Mon 9 Nov 2009
Don’t forget to have kids
Posted by Ronit under Mika Brzezinski '89 at 12:13 pm
Mika Brzezinski ‘89 posts advice for young women about life lessons and career choices, concluding with this piece of heteronormative patriarchal oppression which seems perfect for an EphBlog post:
Print • EmailOf course all of this advice is not as radical as it would have seemed a generation ago. Most young women expect to have a career and plan to go the extra mile.
But what I find always gets bulging eyes and double takes is when I say something like this as my closer.
“Ladies, one more thing: and perhaps the most important thing I will say here today. If you plan to have a family, please .. PUH-leeease, do NOT forget to get married and have kids. And start now. Even in your 20’s!
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41 Responses to “Don’t forget to have kids”
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David says:
Brzezinski is exactly right. I have never met an Eph woman who reports that she had kids too soon. I have met Eph women who had kids at the right time. There are many Eph women who regret having waited too long. I suspect that Brzezinski’s has many female Eph friends in that category.
Needless to say, the marriage and childbearing decisions of Ephs would make for a great senior thesis. When do Ephs get married? When do they have children? What do they, decades later, say about those choices?
A related point that Brzezinski hints at is the fact that life does not slow down. It is tempting to think, in law school, that you are too busy for children. And then to wait a few years and think the same thing when you start practicing. And then wait a few years and think, in the important time before making partner, that you have no time. And then, wait a few years, make partner and then be so busy establishing yourself as a revenue-generator, that you still have no time, much less if you decide to strike off on your own or to a new firm.
The same always-busy career path occurs in almost all high-speed professions.
Did Brzezinski talk about this topic when she was back at Williams for convocation?
JG says:
I think you need to ask different questions then. The answer would more likely be expressed as wishing she were more financially stable or further along in a career or through grad school and not “regret” anywhere near the fact of having children. Personally I think you and Mika should avoid making childbearing decisions for your fellow Ephs, female or male. Everyone has different circumstances and I, as a woman in a demanding profession, have been exhorted and been fed anecdotes from all perspectives on this issue. The only conclusion I’ve reached is that the whole lot of you should butt the hell out of my uterus. Sharing your experience is one thing but telling someone else what to do presumes the rightness of your choices for everyone else.
Kirsten says:
I don’t know, JG, she did say “IF” – and *most* (not all) women do want to get married and/or have kids someday. She was just saying that you shouldn’t try to put it off forever until some magical “perfect time” because no such thing exists. In my own case, I decided to have a baby first and then think about grad school – because school could wait, but my uterus might not. (And I’m glad I did, because the decisions I would have made then about school might not have been where I ended up, and I’m very happy.) But I would never presume to tell someone else what to do, or extrapolate my example to someone else’s life.
I agree, though – there need to be different questions. Most people would not say they regret having a child who has been born and is here and wonderful – but they might regret the circumstances.
1980 says:
I agree that she’s saying there is no magical “perfect time” in a career to have children and I agree with her. If I had waited for that I would have never had children.
Jr. Mom says:
Gosh, I can’t imagine doing it differently than I did, or having any regrets about my timing. There really is no “right” time. The best laid plans, etc. etc….
And, I would never presume to give advice to someone else, other than if and when you do have kids, commit to the experience and have as much fun with them as you can. Because in the blink of an eye, they are checking into their college dorms.
David says:
So, you don’t give advice about other topics like to work hard in school, try new courses in college, take care of your friends and so on? I doubt that. I bet that you, like all of us, give advice on all sorts of topics, all the time. No doubt that you, like all of us (and like Mika in her blog post) couch that advice with all sorts of disclaimers. After all, no piece of advice is true for everyone, everywhere, and at all times.
But Mika is giving the best advice she has, based on the typical experience of the women that she knows.
You must travel in very different circles from Mika and me. I am glad things worked out for you, as they did for my wife. But you don’t know any women who waited too long and were unable to conceive? You don’t know any women who, having waited too long, went through painful and expensive fertility treatments? The reason Mika is giving this advice is because of what she has seen her female friends and co-workers go through.
Kirsten says:
No, David, I try to keep from butting into other people’s lives, unless they specifically ask me for my opinion. And even then, I tend to remember that I can only offer *my* perspective, which may be different than their own. I know this is a tricky idea for you to understand.
What I was trying to say – and I suspect Jr. Mom was too, though I don’t want to put words into her mouth – is that everyone prioritizes elements in their life differently, and I would never presume to judge someone else’s priorities.
David says:
Mika is not out to “judge” anyone. She is giving advice. She is claiming that too many smart women wait too long to get married and have children. Assume for a second that she honestly believes that to be true. Would you recommend that she keep silent on the topic for fear that she is “butting into other people’s lives?”
frank uible says:
The sooner youse broads have kids, the sooner their fathers will be comforted in their old age by them kids and their kids.
1980 says:
David I think Mika is saying something different. She isn’t saying women wait too long. She is saying don’t think that there will be that one perfect moment in your career to have children. In any career I don’t believe that happens. From a career perspective some might say I had my first child at a less than ideal time. Looking back, it turned out to be a good time for me anyways.
Jr. Mom says:
Dave, everyone’s circumstances are different. And finding a “good man”, “getting married”, and “having kids”, is not a formula, nor is it on everyone’s agenda.
And even if you want to be a parent, when, and with whom, isn’t always as simple as finding a good partner and starting young.
I’m sure Mika means well, and her advice is endearing in that it shows how much she appreciates her kids and her husband, but it’s also presumptuous in whom it seeks to address.
Jr. Mom says:
Oh, and BTW, this comment of yours:
The majority travel in “very different circles” from you and Mika. Which, long story short, is my point.
rory says:
@David: that may have been the single most misleading and bullshit use of a quote out of context i’ve ever seen. I’d say well done, but it’s not something to be proud of.
David says:
Rory: I have no idea what you are talking about. Which quote? How is it out of context?
Jr. Mom: Let me quote you and provide the responses that I think Mika would give. And, again, the debate here is between you/others and Mika.
True! But advice can still be true and useful on average even if it is not true/useful for every individual.
Of course! And that is why I started the advice with this key phrase: “If you plan to have a family . . .” If you don’t plan/want to have a family, this advice does not (obviously!) apply to you.
Exactly! My point is that women in their 20s, on average, overestimate how easy these goals are to accomplish if they wait too long to get started.
All advice is, to some degree, presumptuous. Don’t you have opinions about what sort of classes your son and his friends should take? Don’t you have thoughts on how they might get the most out of their Williams education? Do you keep those opinions to yourself? I hope not. The more advice and opinions that people over 40 share with people under 40, the better.
rory says:
you quote jr mom like thus: “And, I would never presume to give advice to someone else” and then berate jr. mom for giving advice about school and friends and basically accuse her of hypocrisy and lying.
jr mom actually wrote this: “And, I would never presume to give advice to someone else, other than if and when you do have kids, commit to the experience and have as much fun with them as you can” It’s clear that jr. mom is speaking about giving advice specifically about when to have kids, not about never giving any advice at all. to cut off her sentence and not even make clear you’re doing so was misleading and presented her comment in the worst possible light.
to me, it’s telling that the three women (1980’s gender i do not know) in this post all disagree with you.
i also love that you (or your “mika”) claims to know what the average experience of women in their 20s currently is: “My point is that women in their 20s, on average, overestimate how easy these goals are to accomplish if they wait too long to get started.”. LOL. how utterly presumptuous and lacking in actual evidence.
Ronit says:
1980 says:
Rory – I’m female.
rory says:
1980–then i’d revise me comment to say 3.5 of 4 as you seem to have found a middle ground between david and the other women in this thread. or is that an inappropriate characterization?
David says:
Rory: Ahh. I see your point on the quote. It was certainly not my intent to mislead. I still think, however, that there is a tension between Jr. Mom’s readiness (which I applaud!) to give advice on various topics and her insistence that Mika not give advice on this one.
Again, your fight here is with Mika. She is giving advice to women in their 20s. Why do you think she is doing this? To me, the obvious answer is that she thinks that some of them are making a mistake, that they are underestimating the difficulties of starting a family later in life. She thinks they are misinformed. Please explain to us why she is wrong.
rory says:
@David: your pretend mika (did she say that? do you know she’d say something like that?) purports to know what the average experience in the 20s is, yet i highly doubt she has any evidence to support her claims^. Methinks she says “average” when she means “average for a well-educated member of the urban professional class”. Her point may be fine for that group, her advice perhaps legitimate, but it isn’t generally applicable to, say, the women in rural america or the women in urban high poverty areas whose concerns are not about having enough time so much as they are about finding a good potential partner who would improve their life. A lot of work has been done on the relative lack of “marriagable men” in poor urban neighborhoods because of the high unemployment rate, low average education, and the disproportionate number of young men who are or have been in jail (which makes getting hired even harder, obviously)*.
for example.
^mainly because i think that claim is wrong.
*note that those jail sentences are often due to circumstances of the neighborhood and not some “pathology” of the men.
Jr. Mom says:
@Ronit:
What are you saying?
If you are pointing out that I may have missed Mika saying “If”, I didn’t. What I take issue with is that she seems to think that wanting “family” equals “find a good man”, “get married” and “have {the] kids” early, hence why I used “formula”.
Gosh, EB is the go-to source for how to do everything perfectly!
“Dear
Abby… EphBlog,I was wondering…”
(Swart?)
Ronit says:
@Jr. Mom: She posted this on Huffington Post, not EphBlog.
Jr. Mom says:
It is utterly unlike me to “advise” someone on something as personal as “when” to have kids. You are wrong, wrong, wrong in painting me in that way.
And where do I “insist that Mika NOT give advice”? I said that her advice, though well-meaning, is meant for a limited audience in it’s specificity.
Quit making me into something I’m not, Dave. Please go after someone else, cuz I don’t have time to “undo” the baloney today.
Jr. Mom says:
@Ronit:
I know that. And besides, EB doesn’t need Mika to qualify for my comment at 21.
Oh, and thanks for yet another “correction”.
Ronit says:
@Jr. Mom: You’re welcome.
As you may note, I called Mika’s comments “heteronormative patriarchal oppression” in the original post. I am glad to see you, JG, rory, and others all agree!
David is a very bad man for supporting such sentiments.
rory says:
@Ronit: what’s the view from your high horse like? is it better up there :P
I’ve made no claims about the advice except that david (willfully?) twisted jr. mom’s point and that david’s weird hypothetical version of mika actually is speaking from a very elite experience and claiming it is true for non-elite people and it isn’t.
the main feminist critique of mika’s piece, i’d bet, is far different from what others have said on this post (it would focus more on the lack of a similar “father” comparison and the idea of a “second shift” that is female-centric in our society). that’s the critique of its heteronormative patriarchal point. That’s not what I saw in JGs response or Jr. Mom’s or Kirsten’s or 1980s.
seriously. i’m not sure what your point is. were you serious or sarcastic? if you were sarcastic, you set bait and then, i think, misread what people wrote in response to said bait. bravo, i guess.
Jr. Mom says:
@Ronit:
I meant to comment on your title. It was hilarious. Perhaps the best thing about the post, in fact.
Given the wit of it, I would have been more interested in hearing commentary from you on the topic, once you are done analyzing my comments, that is.
JG says:
Is it lonely up there above it all Ronit?
Jr. Mom says:
@rory:
G*d, I took the title as sarcastic humor! Please do clarify, Ronit.
Derek says:
Wait, do people “start” planning on marriage and kids as if it is part of some schematic? Don’t most of us date, hope to fall in love, fuck it up a few times, finally fall of love, realize, “holy shit, this might work this time”, get married, and at some point have kids? How useful is advice that draws from some abstract normative experience instead of the way the world works?
As someone who got married in my mid-30s and now dealing with the reality that conceiving isn’t as easy as I once imagined, I resent the hell out of the idea that the problem was waiting too long, since given my own life, had I not “waited” this all would be happening with someone else and not the woman I love. The sanctimonious advice givers are really infuriating for those of us who in real life are dealing with these issues and who could not simply have accelerated the process without, say, NOT meeting the person we married. There is a huge contingency that the holders of all knowledge about how others should live their lives seem to be leaving out, and that is that we don’t all live static lives and that most don’t hold off on love with some grand plan at work, but rather we fall in love when we do, and that if we had all had babies with our 20s significant others we would not have ended up with people we did not even meet until our 30s.
dcat
David says:
Rory writes:
Excellent! Once again, EphBlog has iterated to agreement. Mike is not making a claim for all women in all places at all times. She is talking about women like her: college-educated, career-minded, Huffingtonpost-reading.
Derek asks:
Mika is drawing her advice from “the way the world works” for women like her. She has female friends and colleagues and acquaintances. She thinks that some of them have made some bad choices. She wants to see younger women make better choices. So, she offers them advice. Don’t you give advice to junior historians, say graduate students or untenured professors? Isn’t that advice based on your experience and readings rather than on some “bstract normative experience?”
If you giving advice to historian X is OK, why is Mika giving advice to woman Y not OK?
Ben Fleming says:
This is fine as far as it goes, and of course there is probably no “perfect” time. But so what? As Derek says, most of these decisions are dependent on non-job-related timing and happenstance anyways. And to the extent that Mika is just saying that it child-bearing should be more of a priority in general, for everyone, I would simply tell her to piss off. But is she saying that?
Yep, she is. If I were a woman, I wouldn’t think much of this.
Ben Fleming says:
Cross-post. It’s still crappy advice, for the simple fact that for a lot of women, “being a mommy” is not, in fact, the greatest gift she can receive. That is, to be clear, a very particular worldview.
rory says:
i’ve figured it out! where many commenters say “goalpost shift” david says “iterated to agreement”.
IT FINALLY ALL MAKES SENSE.
(btw, i love how I couched my statement in “mights” and “perhaps” because i didn’t want to take a stand, but somehow i agree with him in supporting that advice. Considering I have no kids and am still in my 20s and male, I’ve got no advice or belief that I can give advice on this topic)
Ronit says:
@rory:
Same here. I have no real viewpoint on this topic. I do find this thread highly amusing nonetheless.
ephling says:
Come on this is just the centuries old custom of paying the piper. If you want her advice on becoming a tv personality, which is stated in the opening sentence, you have to at least tolerate her other opinions, with no oligation to accept them. She is no different than Al Gore, Karl Rove, or Oprah or anyone else in that regard. If one likes George Clooney or Brad Pitt as actors and you want to hear what they have to say you accept the fact that their personal views come with it. I think she had good intentions.
David says:
Ben writes:
I guess it depends on what you mean by “particular.” I would guess that a (vast?) majority of Eph mothers would agree with Mika, that motherhood is more important (i.e., “greatest gift”) than their careers.
Rory: I am just doing my best to make sense of the discussion. To me, it seems that there are four objections to Mika:
1) We should not give advice.
2) We should not give advice to people, unless we know them personally.
3) We should not give advice to people about “intimate matters” like marriage and motherhood.
4) Giving general advice on intimate matters is fine, but Mika’s specific advice is crappy.
Any EphBlog readers who agrees that posts like this are helpful can’t use 1) or 2).
Jr. Mom says:
No viewpoint, except to nitpick at the commentary of those of us who do have something to say. Nice way to add to the discussion, Ronit.
Vicarious'83 says:
Advice to Ronit, Rory, and any other single male readers of EphBlog still in their twenties:
1) Find out where Mika’s next public speaking engagement is being held.
2) Bring flowers.
Derek says:
David @32 writes: “Mika is drawing her advice from “the way the world works” for women like her.”
But the problem is that the decision to have children is almost never one simply made by women like her, but also by the men like me who are with the women like her. In other words, it’s not how the world works for women like her, but, in my case, and in the case of almost all couples, how the world works for couples like us. And in the real world there are myriad decisions that couples make or have imposed on them, a vital one being when you meet the person with whom these decisions become relevant. And I would surmise that for a huge number of Williams graduates, these decisions do not even really become factors until we are in our 30s.
dcat
Kim Daboo '88 says:
I sent a brief response to Mika on twitter but I wanted to say more. I agree with the sentiment there is no perfect time to have kids. I also agree that having kids is not the greatest thing ever for all women. There is no “one size fits all”. There’s what is right for YOU, male or female, and everyone else really should butt out.
I had my kids at 39 and 41. I didn’t forget to have them. I was entirely uninterested in having any until my late 30s. And I’d have been a really crappy parent before that point, so maybe the timing was perfect for me after all.