Peace Corps needs to do better when volunteers are raped

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My grandmother didn't have much money. She was a widow who had raised five children on her husband's paycheck from the textile mill. So when she tried to give me $1,000 not to go into the Peace Corps, it was a very big offer.

I told her that I wanted to serve and that it wasn't about money. And I went - to Togo, West Africa, in 1983. My grandmother's fears were about the kind of men I would meet there. She grew queasy thinking about it. I thought her worries were as old-fashioned as her collared housedresses.

The Peace Corps now stands accused of mishandling reports of more than 1,000 sexual assaults of volunteers, including 221 rapes or attempted rapes. Because these crimes are often never reported at all - especially in countries with corrupt local police - the actual numbers of Peace Corps volunteer rape victims are probably much higher.

The organization needs to get serious about this problem, or risk fueling the anxiety of grandmothers everywhere - many of whom may succeed in keeping their progeny at home. Peace Corps director Aaron Williams has appointed a victim's advocate and is implementing better training programs.

The first step is to admit that American women are different, conveying a unique sense of freedom and entitlement. We have that reputation, too - especially those who head across the world for adventure.

In the early months of training, the Peace Corps should address directly how American women are perceived, and recommend ways to avoid giving the wrong message. This is not an effort to blame the victims of sexual assault. But volunteers should be better prepared about cultural differences. For example, we were told that in Togo, women with bare legs were thought promiscuous. Subtler sexual codes should be explored with equal frankness, even when it's embarrassing.

During congressional hearings earlier this month, former Peace Corps women testified that they had felt stalked and constantly afraid. This brings up a second point: volunteers need to be able to report problems to a trusted Peace Corps official, and have them taken seriously. There is absolutely no cause for anyone to remain in a situation where she or he feels like prey - and this should be plainly conveyed to new volunteers. The Peace Corps should document the host countries where volunteers are reporting these problems most often, and reconsider its role there.

Karestan Koenen was raped while she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger in the 1990s. She told Congress this month that one Peace Corps official investigating her case said to her, "I am so sick of you girls going out with men, drinking and dancing, and then when something happens, you call it rape."

Koenen testified that her treatment by the Peace Corps was worse than the rape. Every person connected with this federal program needs to take steps to ensure that this will never happen again. Such a betrayal of someone in the field is far too common in macho outfits like the Peace Corps and the armed services. The U.S. Senate is considering a bill that would give the Pentagon new tools to better prosecute sex offenders in the military.

Clearly, Koenen and her male investigator - probably mirroring women and men generally - view the question of rape very differently. Until humans agree on where the limits are, and who's to blame in every case, organizations that employ women - especially in remote and foreign locations - need to take their side and their view of such incidents.

The Peace Corps is in some measure about exporting American values. A free and savvy cadre of women volunteers, fully supported by the home staff - those are values we can defend.

First published in Newsday

High-quality child care is a good investment

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The United States is sitting on a vast, untapped economic development tool that has received too little notice: our children.

Investing in children before they enter school pays dividends, and yet child care subsidies are at risk as Congress mulls questions about how to reduce the federal deficit. Before you tune this out as the same old "it's for the kids" chorus, consider:

--Children in high-quality programs are more likely to be employed -- and paying taxes -- when they reach adulthood.

--Parents who receive child care subsidies are less likely to need other forms of public assistance. A 2006 report by the Department of Health and Human Services noted that the subsidies are associated with the largest increase in employment for people formerly on welfare.

--Children who receive high-quality care, either at home or outside, are ready to succeed in school, showing a reduced need for special education programs and increased graduation rates.

--Bad child care is more likely to produce juvenile criminals. A Chicago study showed that at-risk children not enrolled in early care and education programs were 70 percent more likely to be charged with a violent crime by age 18.

This last point prompted more than 600 police chiefs, sheriffs and prosecutors -- calling themselves Fight Crime: Invest in Kids -- to write to Congress this spring, urging continued funding for Child Care Development and Block Grants. The grants are the federal government's primary child care assistance to states.

Despite a sizable budget -- $19 billion in federal and state spending in 2008 -- child care subsidies have never kept up with the need. Only a fraction of eligible families received any subsidy that year, according to the Urban Institute; most were stuck on long waiting lists.

In February, Republicans in the House proposed cutting the child care block grants by $39 million. That didn't happen, but the funding is still at risk. In the name of deficit reduction, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) plan for 2012 would reduce spending to 2008 levels. Democrats say that would cause 170,000 families trying to find or keep jobs to lose child care.

To be sure, we must get federal spending under control. But it's fair to ask our leaders to responsibly weigh the value of programs they want to cut.

Child care costs are mind-boggling. A survey by the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies found that, in every region of the United States, the average child care fees for an infant were higher than the average amount that families spend on food. In New York, infant care at a center averages $13,630 a year.

One culprit in underfunding child care is the culture war. Often, those who believe that a parent -- a mom -- should stay home and raise children oppose child-care subsidies. But given modern economic realities, parents will work. Seventy percent of mothers with young children are employed outside the home. And census officials are predicting a boom in the number of single mothers on Long Island, as figures are released this week.

Besides, 50 years of research has found that children of working parents don't turn out to be much different from those with stay-at-home parents, at least when it comes to academic achievement and behavior. That's according to an analysis published in January in the journal Psychological Bulletin, which examined 69 child care studies conducted between 1960 and March 2010.

It's the decent thing to do to help families get on their feet and stay there, not to mention to raise a generation of kids who are prepared for success. But if decency isn't persuasive, think of all the money we'll save on special ed, public assistance and juvenile incarceration.

First published in Newsday

Home-sharing's time returns

Pushed along by those twins of the Great Recession -- unemployment and foreclosure -- America may be moving back under the multigenerational roof.

At a recent reunion of high school friends, I talked to one who had returned to her mother's house, along with her brother and sister. The whole family was back together again, this time with grandchildren added to the mix. It was a disaster. The siblings were fighting as much as they had in high school.

Another friend's son was enlisting in the Army to avoid moving back into her home after graduation. The Census Bureau says that 54 million Americans were living in multigenerational families in 2010, up from 49 million two years earlier. That's the highest count since 1968.

Of course, it's nothing new for large extended families to live under one roof. In many parts of the world, it's the norm. In this country, Asians and Hispanics have higher rates of multigenerational living, perhaps reflecting greater cultural acceptance.

But for the most part, since the 1950s, the American middle class has assumed that one is up and out at 18. Each nuclear family, according to this standard, had its own home.

And that attitude can make moving back in together -- or "doubling up" in demographers' terms -- feel like a step backward. It can be a sign of financial desperation, a response to unemployment, lack of child care or health care, or affordable rents.

But there are many advantages that generations can offer one another: care-taking for the young or old, emotional support and the sharing of life lessons. Those benefits -- as well as the financial considerations -- are what led the Huntington-based Family Service League, a social services agency, to create its HomeShare program, which matches older adults with someone who could use their spare bedroom.

Artist Milton Colón, 47, heard about the program through Fountainhead Church in East Northport. He is sharing the Smithtown home of Meinhard and Aino Joks, who are 86 and 85. Colón does the laundry, cooking, bed-making and errands, allowing the Jokses to stay in their home even though their home health care benefits have run out.

In turn, the Jokses have given him shelter and stability. Colón's wife of 22 years died in 2008, of an accidental overdose, and he fell apart. He began living out of his car.

While she was alive, Colón had made a living painting portraits. He was as busy as he wanted to be -- before the recession drained his Brentwood business of customers.

The Jokses are from Estonia and Finland and tell him stories of their emigration after World War II. "I'm a World War II history buff," Colón says. "So, that's something we share. I love history. I could take it in all day."

In the evenings, he works at a basement desk on a comic strip that he's developing. It's about a proud Puerto Rican father named Flores who moves his family from Brooklyn to the suburbs -- "Flowers in Blue," Colón's own story. His new home with the Jokses not only tethers him back to family life, it gives him an artist's freedom from financial worries.

That's the facet of multigenerational living that is not often expressed. We all know about the tensions and bickering -- the fall from the ideal after having somehow slipped off the path to the single-family home. But there is sweetness, too.

So why not make the best of what, for some, has become the new American reality? With 8.8 percent unemployment and 2.36 million homes foreclosed by banks between 2007 and 2010, the middle class is struggling. Independent living may be an American value, but so is helping each other through hard times.

First published in Newsday

Public schools lack independence to analyze cost-savings

Lately, everyone seems to be offering ideas about how to save money in the public schools. People familiar with business or even household budgets look at the problem and want to apply a little common sense. One of the most popular suggestions: Cut the number of superintendents down to one each for Nassau and Suffolk counties, for a potential savings of more than $25 million.

That may sound like a lot, but it would amount to just one-third of 1 percent of the $7.5 billion that Long Island's 124 school districts spend each year. Even so, it's clear that residents are ready for some sign of good-faith reductions from schools.

Decreasing the number of superintendents gained wattage last week as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo addressed crowds around the state and talked about how much these school leaders are paid. He says that 40 percent make $200,000 or more.

Teachers' raises, "steps" (built-in longevity raises) and credits for coursework - which add up to increases of about 6 percent a year - also have Long Islanders reaching for their budget shears. So do the cadres of assistant superintendents, directors, assistant directors, principals, assistant principals - and on and on.

Per-pupil costs reach $23,000 in some Long Island districts, more than double the national average of $10,259. So, yes, Long Island's school costs appear fat. That's why it's surprising that study groups charged with finding savings always come up with so little.

Take the years-long initiative by Nassau County school districts to consolidate non-classroom operations. Albany gave the districts a $1-million grant to figure out how to save money, in part by jointly bidding contracts. The study group looked at student busing, school inspections and cell-phone use. It spent half its grant money - and came up with a mere $760,000 in potential economies. Early estimates were $5 million in savings a year. What a disappointment.

Then there's the Suffolk County study that was supposed to save money through pooled health insurance. A consultant concluded that the reduction would amount to two-tenths of 1 percent of current costs. That useless exercise was funded by a $45,000 state grant.

These studies are plainly approaching the question the wrong way. They seem to eliminate from the outset any possibility that would cause a friend or ally to forfeit cash. For example, the Nassau County group declined to consider using the county attorney's office for legal work, preferring instead to continue paying outside lawyers "experienced" in school law. As if the county attorney couldn't gain adequate experience within a short time.

People inside the school community, who are invariably leading these studies, just aren't independent enough to ask the hard questions. But outsiders are rarely invited in. Instead, those outside the school corridors are essentially told: You don't understand the requirements and pressures on schools. And outsiders are never trusted with essential information to make smart decisions. If you've ever tried to read a school budget, you know what I mean.

We need some sort of hybrid, an independent study group with insider knowledge, like the 2006 state Berger Commission on hospital closings. Budgets are tight. It would be wonderful to find the $1.5 billion in school savings that Gov. Cuomo has targeted without sacrificing music or art, accelerated programs or special education resources, late buses or athletic programs. Maybe that's impossible. Anyone with a novel approach, please drop me an e-mail. This problem needs all the brainpower Long Islanders can bring to bear.

First published in Newsday

Americans should have longer school days, longer school years

In these days of tiger-mother hysteria about raising children with academic backbone, President Barack Obama has weighed in with yet another cause for paranoia. The president dropped India and China into his State of the Union speech last week, just long enough to say they are educating their children earlier and longer.

Generally, school days are longer in Asian countries, and vacation breaks, though more frequent, are shorter - no more than five weeks in summer. Subjects are introduced earlier. South Korean parents, for example, insisted that President Lee Myung-bak recruit more English teachers, so that kids could begin language lessons in the first grade.

Research supports these measures as important to kids' learning. Few educators would disagree that more time on task and shorter intervals away from the classroom are beneficial.

Obama's clear implication is that if we want to keep up, to hold on to a place of prosperity in an increasingly competitive world, we should be considering these things.

Americans have one of the shortest school years on the planet. Our kids attend school for 180 days each year, while Germany and Japan average 230 days. In South Korea - where teachers are hailed as "nation builders" - school is in session for 225 days each year.

By the time American students reach eighth grade, they've spent roughly 400 fewer days in school. So there's a lot of pressure on teachers to cover subjects in a shorter time, and in less depth.

Not coincidentally, perhaps, middle school is where American students begin to fall behind their global peers. By high school, among 30 developed nations, U.S. students rank 15th in reading, 21st in science, 25th in math and 24th in problem-solving. People who study these trends, like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, believe that the United States has stood still while others have moved past us. In an October speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Duncan said, "Here in the United States, we simply flat-lined. We stagnated. We lost our way, and others literally passed us by."

So while people of my generation might say to ourselves, "We didn't know much math, and we turned out OK," we'd be missing the point. The rest of the world is changing. We need to prepare our children for a knowledge economy.

It's not entirely bad for Americans that other countries are growing wealthier and better educated. Having a market for our products abroad is essential to our economic growth, and an educated world is a safer one.

But we don't want to be left behind. Some U.S. schools have been experimenting with more time in the classroom. Roughly 1,000 schools - including 800 charters and about 200 traditional district schools - have expanded their schedules by more than one to two hours a day, according to the National Center on Time and Learning. KIPP Academy, one charter success story that started in the Bronx, requires parents to sign a contract saying they will not pull kids out for a family vacation.

Expect to see more of this. As Congress moves to reauthorize and rework No Child Left Behind, the Obama administration is pushing for flexibility for school districts to break from established norms. In November, the New York State School Boards Association advocated a longer school day and year "where it will serve students well."

Midafternoon dismissal times and long summer breaks are impractical holdovers from an agrarian past - increasingly so, as more homes are led by single parents or two working parents. It's time to dust off those problem-solving skills and put them back to work.

Originally published in Newsday

Shriver launched a Peace Corps that broadened Americans' lives

Although it's been more than two decades, I remember very clearly how nervous I was before stepping out onto the streets of Togo, West Africa, as a newly minted Peace Corps volunteer.

At dinner during our first night in the wet sub-Saharan country, we 40-some volunteers were dining on avocado halves when the lights went out. As our hosts worked to start the backup electrical generator, the sudden darkness jarred me into thinking how far out of my element I was. What if the Togolese were nothing like the people I had known back in my insular, white Massachusetts suburb? What if they were completely alien? I felt a little panicky.

But the lights came back on. I picked at my avocado, and the following day I began a journey - making many good Togolese friends and learning valuable lessons about the universality of human frustrations, dreams and endurance.

Sargent Shriver, the man whose leadership made that journey possible for me and more than 200,000 other Americans, died Tuesday at 95.

President John F. Kennedy launched the organization in 1961, as a way of introducing Americans to the rest of the world. He thought that our reputation abroad was "ugly" and arrogant. In his inaugural address, given 50 years ago today, Kennedy reminded us that we were in the historic position of being able to abolish all poverty or abolish all life.

"To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required," Kennedy said. "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

Shriver, a former Kennedy family employee married to the president's sister, Eunice, was named the Peace Corps' first director. The organization helped Americans grow from our insular 1961 world into the globally engaged nation we are today. The Peace Corps took us by the hand on that adventure. It provided a way to see the world for middle-class people - those who could afford to take a couple of years away from establishing their careers, but wouldn't necessarily be able to travel otherwise. It was an outlet for the tumult of the 1960s, growing quickly to 15,000 volunteers serving in more than 44 countries by 1966.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan first cut, then expanded the Peace Corps. The organization has been embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike, with George W. Bush and Barack Obama among its strongest supporters.

Shriver could have settled for Kennedy's original vision of sending some nice, young Americans abroad to charm the Third World. But he insisted on technical skills from the Peace Corps' early days. And he extracted a pledge from every volunteer to not only help host countries meet their needs for trained men and women, but to return to the United States to, in turn, bring the world to Americans.

Former Mali volunteer Anne Kopstein of Huntington takes photos to classrooms and community groups to talk about her experiences. Claudia Hart, who became a teacher in Connecticut, has devoted a corner of her home to Zaire, which her students visit. David Olson, another Togo volunteer, advocates on behalf of global health issues in Washington.

As Sargent Shriver departs for his next assignment, it's worth noting how many lives he touched by seeing the Peace Corps off to a sound beginning: generations of volunteers, their co-workers and friends around the world, and the people at home who are curious to hear our stories.

He made our world larger, just when the globe was shrinking.

Originally published in Newsday

Government programs have failed to stem foreclosures

Even as news reports offer hope of economic recovery, the figures on home foreclosures remain stuck in a recessionary winter. When the books close on 2010, banks will have repossessed a record 1.2 million U.S. homes, up 33 percent from 2009.

On Long Island, we ranked a dreadful second in a new measure published last month: Given the current rate of home sales, it would take 30.4 months to sell all the foreclosed and "distressed" properties here. Only Miami has a larger, slower-moving inventory.

The housing crisis is entering its fourth year, yet people are still losing their homes at a disastrous rate. In Nassau and Suffolk counties, 893 new foreclosure cases were opened in November alone. Despite a series of programs intended to prevent foreclosures, lenders and the federal government have failed.

A congressional panel overseeing the federal programs admitted as much earlier this month. The marquee initiative, the Home Affordable Modification Program, will end up preventing only 800,000 foreclosures, at a maximum, vastly fewer than the 3 million to 4 million it initially aimed to stop. Even more worrisome: This is the third foreclosure prevention effort launched by the federal government since 2007, and the fourth overall. The first was initiated by the mortgage writers themselves - an early washout.

The fundamental flaw in every case is relying on lenders to voluntarily reduce a borrower's monthly payments to affordable levels. One would think that keeping the mortgage checks coming would be in lenders' interests. By foreclosing on a home, they recover only a fraction of the value of the loan.

But apparently there are financial incentives working in the opposite direction. In our system of bundled, resold mortgages, the companies that service the loans can sometimes make more money by charging fees throughout the foreclosure process.

One way around this would be to make loan modifications mandatory. The House voted in 2009 to give bankruptcy court judges the power to reduce mortgages so that people could afford to stay in their homes. Regrettably, the Senate refused to pass this measure. It should be reintroduced.

The government's half-steps to date reflect an unwillingness to "reward" people who foolishly signed up for mortgages they couldn't afford. But many who are struggling have fallen on hard times for unforeseen reasons, often because of job loss. It's a Catch-22 that some people could relocate for new jobs - if only they could sell their homes in this terrible market.

To be sure, it would be better if the housing market recovered and the value of people's homes came back. Some believe the quickest route is to allow the foreclosures to proceed. But blaming homeowners ignores the culpability of lenders, who duped many buyers with teaser rates, balloon payments and outright lies about the loan terms - to say nothing of recent revelations that lenders couldn't produce paperwork to prove they hold the loans. Bankruptcy court judges should be given discretion on whether a lender acted in bad faith.

A new law taking effect Jan. 22 in New York will allow bankruptcy filers to retain up to $150,000 in home equity, or $300,000 for a couple, potentially allowing many to keep their homes. Time will tell if this will be adequate.

It's striking that during the 1930s, the most recent era when U.S. home prices fell so dramatically, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made not only a practical argument to save homes, but a moral plea: The "broad interests of the nation require that specific safeguards should be thrown around home ownership as a guarantee of social and economic stability."

It's time we made this commitment to stability too.

Originally published in Newsday

Paycheck Fairness Act wrong choice for women

By ANNE MICHAUD anne.michaud@newsday.com

Equal pay for women. What fair-minded person wouldn't favor that? Well, the U.S. Senate, for one.

Earlier this month, the Senate refused to consider a bill that would strengthen current law against gender-based wage discrimination. The bill was sold by its Democratic sponsors, including President Barack Obama, as a means of closing the pay gap between women and men performing the same job.

But even though often-cited U.S. Census figures show women still make 77 cents to a man's dollar, the Senate did the right thing.

Don't get me wrong - it's crucial that women are paid fairly. Women's earnings are more important than ever to support families. Dual-earner households have jumped to 46 percent of families with children, and last year, the number of married couples with children who depend exclusively on women's earnings rose 36 percent. And of course, many women are raising children alone.

For years, women's earnings made progress relative to men's, but those gains stalled in the early 1990s. The Paycheck Fairness Act seeks to remedy this, in part, by making private salary information more public. The House passed the measure in 2009.

But a chief argument for the bill - that 77 cents-on-the-dollar figure - is highly misleading. It doesn't come from examining men and women in comparable work situations. Instead, researchers took the sum total of men's wages and divided them by women's. They didn't account for women gravitating toward occupations that allow for predictable hours, part-time schedules and other family-friendly attributes. Teaching, secretarial work, nursing - the traditional "women's jobs" are still largely held by women. The pay gap narrows with those caveats in mind.

Also, the bill is too intrusive on private business decisions. Employers would be required to prove a valid reason for pay disparities. But what if a company offers more money for work in a dangerous location, and more men volunteer? What if an employer gives a raise to a man to keep him from accepting a competitor's job offer? Does the company then have to bump up the salary of his female counterpart?

It's a utopian wish, perhaps, but merit should be the only basis for hiring and promotion. At least it's worth striving for.

Of course, there are valid pay disputes that women should litigate. But the Equal Pay Act of 1963 offers enough protection against pay discrimination. The new bill could unfairly disadvantage employers because it wouldn't limit punitive or compensatory damages. Companies might settle even weak claims to avoid a jury trial.

With the Senate's inaction, the Paycheck Fairness Act is probably dead. The wave of Republicans arriving in January means the new Congress isn't likely to take up this particular version again. Advocates for women and fairness should leave this flawed approach behind and work with the Obama administration on other critical priorities, like access to affordable child care.

Also needed are flexible workplaces that don't push women out of the workforce at childbirth, and allow them richer opportunities to re-enter their fields after time away.

Women also need to think more about the paycheck repercussions of their various choices in life, from pursuing degrees and training, to assuming that a male partner's salary will cover our household wage gaps. Too often, that's just no longer the case. Women need to be able to depend on their own resources for at least part of their lives.

Personal and political solutions - both are required to achieve real paycheck fairness.

Anne Michaud is the Newsday Opinion Department's interactive editor.

We middle-class Moms must make some trade-offs

Here's a post I wrote, published today on the NYT's Motherlode blog. I wrote this in response to a Mom's entry about her nanny, which you can read all about here. My two cents:

We're going through a time of change, where we middle class women find ourselves "required" to work and raise children at the same time. In some ways, our lives may be less fulfilling than our mothers'. It's fair for us to debate these issues here, out loud.

Having said that, I think that we're all going to have to accept the tradeoffs that our work-family situations require. It hurts me, sometimes a lot, that I'm not home with my two 'tween daughters. But I take strength from knowing that I am providing for them, materially, by working. These are competing feelings that I have to reconcile. When I feel that I've been too immersed in work, I cut back and take my kids out for a special day or weekend. I've sometimes changed jobs to have more time with them. I suppose that if I ever got to the end of that line of logic, I would join the radical moms I've read about who are growing their own food and rejecting consumerism and status labels. I'm privileged to have all of these options, but that doesn't make it easy or painless.

I also take solace in the idea that if our generation works through some of these issues, it will benefit our sons and daughters when they're raising families.

Child care choices persist into adolescence

Last month, a study about early child care came out with mixed results – one good for day care, and one bad. I decided to go back and take a look at how the news media covered the story. I have a bias: I think that we in the media reflect the American public's ongoing discomfort with the choices that dual-income families must make. Even though, at 46 percent of homes with children, dual-income households are becoming the norm. As I say, the study came up with good and bad findings. One of the biggest long-term projects of its kind, the University of California-Irvine study quizzed 15-year-olds who had been in day care as little ones. The study found that the teens who had attended "high-quality" day care did better in school than even those kids who stayed home. But the study also found that all day-care kids, regardless of the quality of care, were slightly more likely to take risks.

Is that a bad thing? Apparently, in teenagers it is. When we think of teens and risk, we think “drugs” and “sex.” Although, adult risk-takers, like inventors and money managers, are often highly compensated for such.

Anyway…. The results: My quick Nexis search turned up six neutral headlines, such as this one from States News Service, “Link between child care and academic achievement and behavior persists into adolescence.”

Five headlines gave a positive spin, like this from the Dayton Daily News: “Quality care in childhood pays off, study says.”

And seven headlines played up the negative. Here, from the Chicago Tribune, “Study: Day care kids show rash behavior as teens.”

I’m going to conclude that my bias at the outset was a little rash. This is fairly even-handed coverage – and good news for those of us who care about such things.

I also found the description of what constitutes high-quality child care to be illuminating, and cause for optimism. I remember looking for this description right after the study was published in mid-May, but I didn’t find anything this complete. I wonder if UCI updated it. No matter, here is study director Deborah Lowe Vandell’s take:

Q: How do you define a “high-quality” child care setting? ?A: It’s one where caregivers are warm, loving, sensitive, respectful and responsive to children’s needs. There should also be cognitive stimulation, with teachers talking and reading to children. If a child is wandering or getting into conflicts with other children, caregivers should find ways to intervene. If children are busy and engaged, however, caregivers should not interrupt or intrude.

What do you think? What's your observation about how child care affects kids? Does your child care measure up to this standard?

Dual-income families show signs of strain

We parents know we're stressed out. Now researchers are documenting it. Social scientists from UCLA installed videocameras in the homes of 32 families, all middle class, with two earners and multiple children. The cameras recorded nearly every waking moment at home for a week. Writes the New York Times' Benedict Carey:

... the U.C.L.A. project was an effort to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug, every tantrum, every soul-draining search for a missing soccer cleat....

Dual-earner households with children have existed for years, especially in lower-income neighborhoods. But the numbers have jumped in recent decades, to 46 percent of families with children in 2008 from 36 percent in 1975.

Kathleen Christensen of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which financed the project, said parents learned on the fly — and it showed.

I think that if we parents could anticipate some of the challenges and decisions we have to make, we'd be better off. Almost no family I know is living in the same circumstances, years later, in which they started.

One family I know, for example, relocated several times between the cities of New York and Los Angeles -- only to discover that their two sons needed less regimentation than city living could provide. My brother Bill made a similar decision, moving from inside the Washington Beltway to rural Connecticut, where his in-laws have provided support and extended family connections.

Dan-my-husband and I have taken turns commuting to New York City, which is about an 80-minute trip, one way. One of us always works closer to home, in case we get one of those emergency calls from the school that our daughter is sick -- or even just to deliver a pair of sneakers in time for gym class.

Each decision to arrange one's life differently is a value judgment. I'm exploring these values for my book-in-progress, Rocket Science for Working Moms. One of my values is a desire for my children to feel safe and supported, even though I have a 40-hour-plus time commitment to my employer. Other parents have altered their lives so their kids can learn to entertain themselves imaginatively without tying them to a dead-bolted schedule.

Learning on the fly is common, but it isn't much fun -- as the researchers on the UCLA project discovered.

“The very purest form of birth control ever devised. Ever,” said one, Anthony P. Graesch, a postdoctoral fellow, about the experience.

Crossing the pre-teen ravine

A couple of nights ago, my two daughters and I set up yoga mats in the living room. I had discovered that I could stream yoga instruction videos through Netflix's "instant play" option. So, we set the laptop on the coffee table, selected a video and stretched our way through downward dog and camel. I'm searching for new ways for us to enjoy time together, now that they are leaving childhood. I'm actually in a small panic about the whole thing, although I tell myself that it will pass. Dan-my-husband went through this several months ago, as Isabelle rounded her 12th-and-a-half year and bulleted toward 13. "She was such a great kid," he mused one evening, changing into his pajamas.

"She's still a great kid!" I replied, defensively. But I knew what he meant. Her interest in being a child had been full and complete. She barreled down snowy hills, caring to catch every mogul. She worked her diving board technique with a religious passion. She never met a dog she didn't go out of her way to greet. Rocks from her collected adventures littered my kitchen windowsills.

Isabelle's maturity was the first shock, but Charlotte, 17.5 months younger, is following fast behind. They are dragging up the rope ladder behind them. Suddenly, I find myself with -- O, joy! -- time to pursue the interests I have been suppressing these long years, more than a decade. I emerged recently from a three-month jag of writing a book proposal, having satisfied a long-deferred longing in my heart, only to find that my daughters no longer needing me so intensely. I felt as though I had skipped a chapter somewhere, lost a transition. Lost in transition. Maybe that's what I am.

But I don't want to wallow in the melodrama of it all. And so, the yoga class. I am determined to move into the future alongside my daughters, these near-women. I hope to cross soon to the side where the gain is as clear and perceptible as the feeling of loss.

Post-racial, post-partisan, post-Mommy Wars?

Our society is said to be getting past a lot of things these days. We elected our first black president. We're increasingly registering to vote unidentified with either of the two major parties. It makes me wonder if we are also ready to slough off the labels -- and bitter tensions -- that apply to the Working Moms vs. Stay-at-Home Moms. Writing in O: The Oprah Magazine this month, author Elizabeth Gilbert writes about the accomplished lives of her women friends -- Moms, single career women, all stripes -- and wonders why so many of them are waking up at 3 a.m. tormented with self-doubt. Gilbert, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love believes that women lack "centuries of educated, autonomous female role models to imitate," and that we are forging new paths.

By all rights, every one of these clever, inventive women should be radiant with self-satisfaction. Instead, they twitch with near-constant doubt, somehow worrying that they are failing at life.

When I look at my life and the lives of my female friends these days -- with our dizzying number of opportunities and talents -- I sometimes feel as though we are all mice in a giant experimental maze, scurrying around frantically, trying to find our way through. But maybe there's a good historical reason for all this overwhelming confusion. We don't have centuries of educated, autonomous female role models to imitate here (there were no women quite like us until very recently), so nobody has given us a map. As a result, we each race forth blindly into this new maze of limitless options. And the risks are steep. We make mistakes. We take sharp turns, hoping to stumble on an open path, only to bump into dead-end walls and have to back up and start all over again. We push mysterious levers, hoping to earn a reward, only to learn -- whoops, that was a suffering button!

She encourages women to keep trying, and failing when necessary, and to keep mapping our own lives. This is the impulse that has led me to begin writing a book on working motherhood, this desire to help make sense of all of our choices and to describe new possible paths for the next generation of women. I'm calling it Rocket Science for Working Moms: Facts and Fuel for Women Launching Their Own Journeys. In it, I discuss a lot of the wrong turns I made, and how my family, and other families I know, have crafted unique ways of working out the new lives open to us -- filled with greater opportunity for women, increased financial pressure and higher expectations for how we raise our children.

Gilbert writes that we should lay down arms in the Mommy Wars and stop competing with each other over whose life is more perfect, fulfilling, correct. I couldn't agree more. But I'm not sure it's human nature to do that. If you're reading this, let me know what you think.