Staying Afloat

Having been spending less time these days in the blogosphere, I've found more time to read hard copy and to watch the news. In so doing, I've noticed more than the usual numbers of stories about the financial difficulties of Americans.
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Credit card companies are reporting that cardholders are charging — that is, borrowing money from credit card companies (banks or other financial institutions) — in order to pay for necessities such as groceries, utility bills, and even local taxes. Even those who may previously have paid off their credit-card debt during the thirty-day grace period with no interest (sometimes referred to as a "float"), are now carrying a balance from month to month — a practice that can easily lead to financial ruin. In addition, rather than limiting the use of credit cards to big purchases and vacation-travel protection, families are discovering the necessity of using plastic money to pay for their monthly financial obligations. Accordingly, as the commercial tells us, too many Americans are simply up to their eyeballs in debt.

Certainly, the subprime mortgage crisis is one of the causes of the fatal use of credit cards. In my view, however, other causes are significantly contributing to the financial meltdown that many families are now facing. Americans have developed a buy-now, pay-later mindset. Furthermore, during “better times,” when they were using credit cards to purchase such luxury items as HD plasma televisions and vacations in the Cayman Islands, many Americans failed to internalize the consequences of using a credit card that produces debt in the form of a short-term bank loan. Ultimately, deferred payments do, in time, become payable.

Interest rates on credit cards bear at least one resemblance to balloon payments on leased vehicles. Once a certain pay-less point has passed, those rates become unmanageable, largely because payments early on apply nothing or very little to the principal borrowed. At some point, the day will arrive when payments transform from inconvenient to impossible. In other words, the discretionary spending of disposable income morphs into incurring significant financial obligation.

No matter how frugally one lives, some financial expenditures are impossible to avoid. Emergencies do arise and usually at the worst possible moment. But Americans have discovered that once they reach the spending limitations of one credit card, they can simply get another one, and another, and another one. In the modern political lexicon, Americans fall prey to “predatory practices” of lending institutions, even when these citizens are “just asking for it.”

Apparently, most people don't understand that a house of cards is destined to collapse; it is never a matter of if — but when. High Debt, and its brother Unmanageable Debt, can easily lead to the collapse of a house of cards. And, as in "The Fall of the House of Usher," the consequences for irresponsible behavior are weighty.

But never fear. Another credit-card application will soon arrive in the mail.

(Further reading: "Inside the Mind of a Debtor Nation")

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Outsourcing Family Life

Note: Yesterday I posted similar version of the following at THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS.

Image credit


According to this November 25, 2007 article in the Washington Post, some families are becoming too busy to take care of all sorts of tasks which make a family a cohesive unit:

Initially, the busy McLean couple hired Ezra Glass for a few mundane chores, like waiting for the cable guy. But over time, they began giving him more intimate tasks -- planning their last-minute vacations and picking up their kids from time to time.

Now Glass takes their cars to be serviced, is a house- and dogsitter and advises them on their home audio-visual system. He planned the funeral reception for a relative, taking the death certificate and the suit for burial to the funeral home.

"We've come to rely on him more and more," said Ken Nunnenkamp, 46, a lawyer. "He'll essentially do anything we can't get around to. . . . You definitely get spoiled by it."

Forget the dog walker and errand runner. Today, some busy two-career families are turning over virtually every aspect of their existence to lifestyle managers. These hired hands, who charge a monthly membership fee or up to $100 an hour, become like an extra member of the family.
Lifestyle managers have searched for a reliable used car for a client's 16-year-old or taken over their scrapbooking project. One wrote an online dating profile for a client. Others have negotiated overseas adoptions or bailed their clients out of jail. Another was handed a brown paper bag full of insurance documents from a client's recent surgery with the command to sort it out.

"People are ceding more and more of their lives to others," said Glass, a Potomac native. "It's going to be a huge trend around here. Our clients are mostly suburban families because they have a whole range of problems to deal with -- kids, carpools, dogs, houses."

[...]

Such personal helpers are often hired by mothers who want to appear as if they're doing it all and don't want their neighbors -- or husbands -- to know otherwise....

What is happening to the family unit? Are parents becoming too busy with their careers and social climbing? I noted in the article the following:

[One mother] has held onto certain rituals with her children, such as driving them to school -- even if she's on her way to catch the New York shuttle -- or packing their favorite lunch of Mediterranean rice and yogurt.

Since when is rearing children a ritual?

My mother, who married my father relatively late in life at the age of thirty-four, worked outside the home until a heart attack at the age of forty-four forced her to retire on permanent disability. But never did I feel that Mom was so overwhelmed by family life that she handed over her parental and familial responsibilites to someone else. Sure, I had babysitters, and we had live-in help; however, once my mother came home from work, she resumed her duties, including having long talks with me, fixing dinner, supervising my homework and piano practice, and, when I was very young, giving me my nightly bath and reading bedtime stories to me. Furthermore, Mom obviously took joy in doing all the mundane tasks. Never did I get the impression that she was being pushed too far; to the contrary, she later spoke of how she had wished that she could have spent more time with me. Her family was the center of Mom's life, and everything else took a back seat. The same applied to my father. In other words, both of my parents considered family life as their most important responsibility and not something to hand over to someone else because they were "too pressured" or "too busy."

In my view, something very detrimental is happening to family units wherein parents are too busy to make a house a home. These parents are kidding themselves if they believe that they are doing their children a favor by outsourcing family life.

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The Sense Of Entitlement

I've long believed that embuing a child with a false sense of self-esteem will wreak unintended consequences later in life. Today in our society we are seeing those consequences in all sorts of ways, including at the career and the university levels:

"What employers and universities find is not only that young people lack basic skills, but also they have this overwhelming sense of entitlement," he says, attributing it to schools in which children received "gold stars and happy faces for mediocre work," as well as the "trophies-for-all" approach to youth sports and parents "who were more concerned about being their children's buddies rather than authority figures."

The above quotation from this article in the November 14, 2007 edition of the Washington Times is attributed to Charles Sykes, author of 50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education and Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add. He contends that the "bubble-wrapping" children — insulating them from the bumps, bruises, and frustrations of life — leaves them unprepared for the realities of life. Read the entire article from the Washington Times.

A recent segment 60 Minutes illustrates the result of the rah-rah mentality on the work force. CLICK HERE to watch the video, about twenty minutes in length and worth your time.

"Too Much of a Good Thing," an article from Scholastic.com, illustrates that, despite all the good intentions on the part of the self-esteem builders, young people are being psychologically and academically handicapped when parents and teachers ignore the importance of abandong standards in favor of promoting self-esteem (emphases mine):

We encourage them, we celebrate them, and we give them stickers and stars. But are we doing more harm than good?

Ask Korean eighth graders, “Are you good at math?” and chances are they’ll say they aren’t. Ask an American, and you’ll likely get an enthusiastic response. In a recent study, only six percent of Korean eighth graders considered themselves excellent math students, compared with 39 percent of American eighth graders. Yet the Korean students scored far better in math than their American peers.

We’ve taught our children since birth to believe they can do anything they choose, from starring in the school play to mastering long division. All that self-confidence, however, hasn’t produced more capable students. The Brookings Institution 2006 Brown Center Report on Education finds that countries in which families and schools emphasize self-esteem for students—America for example—lag behind the cultures that don’t focus on how students feel about themselves.

For decades our culture has concentrated on teaching self-esteem first, learning second. In the late 1980s, a California government task force found no connection between low self-esteem and societal ills, such as drug use, teen pregnancy, and school underachievement. Still, California forged ahead with a self-esteem education plan. Today, raising children’s self-esteem continues to be a primary goal in the classroom, and a goal of parents at home.

Downplaying grades, praising children for minimal effort, or using neutral-colored green or purple pens to comment on written work seems harmless enough, but we may be taking away the sense of satisfaction and pride that comes from genuine achievement. Jason Walsh, a special education teacher in Washington, D.C., witnessed this firsthand during his school’s fifth-grade graduation ceremonies. Some students received as many as 14 different awards. “The majority of the students didn’t know what their awards really meant,” says Walsh. The honors “didn’t reinforce a specific achievement—but a sense of entitlement and of being great.”

The long-term impact of this rah-rah mentality is already apparent. In 2004, according to Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me, 70 percent of American college freshmen reported their academic ability as “above average.” But, once ego-inflated students get to college, they’re more likely to drop out, says Twenge, when their skewed sense of self and overconfidence affects their ability to make decisions.

A growing contingent of experts agree that in the classroom, self-esteem should be an outcome, not a method. “Self-esteem,” says Robert Brooks, Harvard Medical School faculty psychologist, “is based on real accomplishments.” It’s all about letting kids shine in a realistic way.

Feel-Good Academics

There is a correlation between self-esteem and grades; studies have shown that high grades do lead to high self-esteem. But rather then praising children for every effort along the way, we should encourage them to focus on achieving particular goals and applaud that achievement. The danger of too much praise is that children may turn their focus to how good they feel and how to get more praise, rather than on what they’re learning. “All children should be held accountable,” says Karen Bernstein, music teacher at Howard B. Mattlin Middle School in Long Island, New York. “We shouldn’t worry about setting boundaries for kids because of their feelings.” In her classroom, Bernstein makes children responsible for their actions, so that when they do achieve, “they feel good.”

If a student’s confidence isn’t built on their actual abilities, failure can be devastating. Walsh worries that his students’ sense of greatness may lead to a “psychological crash and burn” because they don’t understand why they failed. Walsh’s hunch is on track, according to experts; children who work solely for praise don’t feel intrinsic satisfaction. Even if a child feels competent, says John Shindler, associate professor of education at California State University, it’s not real competence if it’s rooted in constant praise. Furthermore, students absorbed with their own sense of self often have difficulty completing difficult tasks. One study shows that adolescent girls have lower self-esteem than adolescent boys. When confronted with a low score, the girls are more likely to work to improve their performance, while the boys are more likely to give up and change activities. “The real issue,” says Rick Weissbourd, who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, “is getting kids to develop a sense of self-efficacy, along with real competencies and skills. Self-esteem will follow.”

What Teachers Can Do

The latest findings on self-esteem can be dispiriting for teachers. After all, who wouldn’t want to make students feel good about themselves? Rather than tear down your “Shoot for the Stars” poster, reassess your priorities. Make sure that your primary focus is on student performance and improvement, rather than how kids feel about themselves. Emphasize effort and specific character traits, such as persistence, helpfulness, and consideration.

Students need to see that achievement is related to the effort they put out. Establish clear expectations and rubrics that students can use to achieve the outcome, with effort as one of the criteria for success. If a student has trouble with large goals, says Bernstein, break the task into achievable chunks.

It’s all about realism, adds Twenge. Instead of focusing on how great the students are, highlight students’ real strengths. Teach them that none of us can be good at everything all the time. Weissbourd recommends that for each child in your class, identify three of his or her strengths and then make a plan to highlight those strengths.

Ask your students, what can they learn from this situation? What can they contribute? What do they want to achieve this week, month, or year? Then help them create goals and a way to achieve those goals.

Focus on actions and real character traits, not “special” and “great.” The best kind of praise, says Weissbourd, “communicates a specific achievement and the importance of effort in that achievement.” When you correct children, focus on what the child can do better next time, and show them how.

Aha! Diagnostic and prescriptive teaching! A lost art?

Continuing now with the article:

Don’t shelter children from failure. Children who are shielded from failure are not prepared to deal with adversity. When students fail, tell them exactly why and provide clear ways for them to succeed the next time. To break the ice, suggests Brooks, tell your students about a time when you failed in school, and how you recovered.

A Classroom Full of VIPs

Of course, you are working with children who have already been raised in a self-esteem world. They may think that they deserve recognition regardless of how they perform, and believe they should be considered first. Kids who act out don’t have poor self-esteem, says Twenge. Instead, they often think that they’re the most important person in the room and that everyone else is getting in their way.

When a child is disruptive, you need to figure out why the child is acting that way and work with them to fix it. William Ricks, a teacher in Sussex, Virginia, asks his students to walk with him in the hall to talk with them about their behavior. “I try to find the root of their attitude,” says Reid, “and then I talk to them about humility.” Addressing students’ needs is crucial for behavior and academics. Once students’ “social and emotional needs are met,” says Bernstein, “they will be more likely to work harder.”

Focusing on praise and avoiding riticism makes everybody feel good. But children who have high self-esteem may become rude and uncooperative when they’re criticized. Still, “don’t try to protect students from failure,” says Jennifer Crocker, Claude M. Steele Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Instead, when we make failure a learning experience and not a threat, the student’s self-esteem isn’t on the line, and they’re more open to taking constructive criticism.

Young children are naturally narcissistic, and teaching them self-esteem keeps them focused on themselves, instead of thinking about others. “Narcissism separates you from other people,” says Twenge, while true “self-esteem brings you into connection with other people.” In the long term, narcissism has been linked with aggression and poor relationships, while connecting children to other people has a positive affect on behavior. And, says Crocker, children learn more when they’re supportive of others.

More important than self-esteem, says Weissbourd, is a child’s maturity, or the ability to be aware of other people, coordinate other people’s needs with their own, and regulate intense feelings. By rewarding our students’ social successes, such as helping their peers, being good community members, and listening, we increase their genuine self-esteem and improve their behavior. Allowing children to help around the classroom, says Brooks, increases their “realistic self-esteem [because children are] making a positive difference in the life of someone else.”

Walsh has worked with students who have inflated egos and no sense of responsibility or respect. Too much self-esteem, he says, “creates a sense of entitlement. I’m not saying that children don’t need reinforcement, but you have to make sure that you develop a realistic, practical, and consistent behavior plan.” When we focus on building students’ self-control, sense of belonging, and competence, we create more self-esteem than we do if we dole out constant praise. “Genuine self-esteem,” says Shindler, is “a set of unconscious self-beliefs, formed over a lifetime, reflecting our perceptions and abilities, our ability to love, and how we attribute causality for the events in our lives.”

Of course, for some years now (Decades?) both parents and teachers are themselves products of "bubble-wrappping," so they want to perpetuate the feel-good mentality in themselves, their children, and their students. In sum, the cycle feeds on itself.

Can the cycle be reversed or slowed? Comments welcome.

Note: Please see The Merry Widow's post "Those 'Fine' Young Cannibals."

[Hat-tip to Raven, at whose web site I found the above article from Scholastic]

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Technology In The Boonies & A Question

Recently, some residents of Loudoun County, Virginia, discovered that the carrot offered by a builder turned out to be a long-term contract which they didn't expect and no longer need. Excerpt from this article in the May 21, 2007 Washington Post:

...Just a few years ago, developers lured homebuyers to the outer suburbs with the promise of lightning-fast Internet access and high-definition television to go along with Olympic-size swimming pools, tennis courts and other amenities.

Residents bragged about not just keeping up with their inner-suburb neighbors but leapfrogging them altogether -- only to watch their technological advantage give way to newer offerings.

What was once state of the art is now par for the course, a frustration familiar to any early adopter who has bought the latest and greatest only to find something better, or cheaper, soon after. For Southernwalk, the price of chasing Internet Nirvana turned out to be a contract that could run 75 years.

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"It was the only way to get Internet out here back then, so the concept seemed like a good idea," said Hodell-Cotti, who moved into the neighborhood with her husband four years ago. She recently bought a satellite dish for better reception, but she still pays the mandatory fee for OpenBand services. "Now there are more options out there, but we're stuck in a monopoly."

[...]

Murali Pavuloori, who works on computer networks for a living, moved into the neighborhood three years ago in part because he wanted Internet speeds often reserved for huge corporations. He doesn't mind the slower connection as much as he does the high fees.

"It's a total rip-off," he said during a meeting with neighbors. "Everybody bought into the promises they [OpenBand] can't keep."...

Homeowners in Loudoun County are lawyering up, of course, and have some hope that they might be able to get the contract overturned; other similar contracts have been abrogated in other similar developments. The real-estate market and the price of gasoline for a longer commute are now such that those hinterland homes with costly Internet access are not as marketable, especially with at monthly fee as described above.

I love my own Internet access, which I upgraded from dial up to broadband about a year and a half ago. But a contract for 75 years? No thank you! Life has a way of changing, and people should have the foresight to remember that good times don't last forever.

This isn't a Friday, so it's not time for the QUESTION OF THE WEEK. But just as a matter of curiosity, I have a question for readers here: What do you pay for Internet access and all those channels for your television?

I pay about $105/month, a fee which includes satellite television ($80) and Internet access with broadband ($25). Of course, I can cancel or switch servers at any time. I can't imagine signing a contract for 75 years!

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Not Like Christians I Know

Via Urban Infidel....Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, has stated their plans to demonstrate at the funerals of the Virginia Tech students who perished at the hands of a murderer on Monday, April 16, 2007:

WBC will preach at the funerals of the Virginia Tech students killed on campus during a shooting rampage April 16, 2007. You describe this as monumental horror, but you know nothing of horror -- yet. Your bloody tyrant Bush says he is 'horrified' by it all. You know nothing of horror -- yet. Your true horror is coming. 'They shall also gird themselves with sackloth, and horror shall cover them; and shame shall be upon all faces, and baldness upon all their heads' (Eze. 7:18).

Why did this happen, you ask? It's simple. Your military chose to shoot at the servants of God today, and all they got for their effort was terror. Then, the LORD your God sent a crazed madman to shoot at your children. Was God asleep while this took place? Was He on vacation? Of course not. He willed this to happen to punish you for assailing His servants.

Like Urban Infidel, I refuse to link to the church's web site.

Westboro is the same group of hate-mongers who claimed that the slaughter of the Amish schoolchildren was God's punishment for that community. The organization — I'm having trouble referring to it as a "church" — eventually decided not to demonstrate at the funerals of the Amish schoolgirls but, as far as I'm concerned, showed their true colors by even sugggesting such an atrocity.

Funerals are for the living. For the bereaved and for those offering heartfelt tributes. Mourners do not deserve the kind of abuse which Westboro dishes out in the name of God and in their perverted view of freedom of speech.

I publicly disavow any connection with this so-called Christian group.

Remember the victims and the bereaved in an appropriate way (graphic lifted from Raven's site):



I can't say it better than Raven did in "Those Who Lost The Most":

While the MSM and many others are focusing on the killer, let’s get to know the victims. For it is they who have lost the most- their lives. A life lost means nothing if it is not remembered.

Two links from the Virginia Tech web site:





Virginia Tech's tribute site

Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund

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Silence Is Golden

Photo from this source
One would think that a fellow as bright as Kiwi Camara, who skipped high school and earned his doctorate in law magna cum laude from Harvard Law School at the impressively young age of nineteen, would have known better than to commit to paper and to the Worldwide Web a racial epithet. From this article in the April 3, 2007 Washington Post:

During Camara's first year at Harvard Law School in 2002, he fueled a controversy when he wrote racist remarks in a voluminous summary of a 1948 Supreme Court decision that barred restrictive covenants based on race. He then posted the writing on a Web site designed to help other law students.

In the five years since he wrote the racist phrase, it has surfaced from campus to campus, job interview to job interview -- a predicament that raises a broader question perfectly fit for these Google times: What's the appropriate standard for judging a teenager years later?

[...]

At George Mason's law school, the faculty had authorized Polsby to hire Camara as an assistant professor, but the dean wanted to first see what students, alumni and others thought. He scheduled a town hall meeting for last night, but the meeting was nixed after Camara's application was withdrawn.

...Some wondered why Camara had made it as far as he did in the hiring process; others were more sympathetic to the fact that Camara cannot shake off something he did when he was not even 18.

Yes, Camar was not yet eighteen, but he was in Harvard Law School. Furthermore, according to the Washington Post, on his web site Camara invites his readers to "Google me!"

On a regular basis, the nightly news broadcasts stories about the foolish and dangerous activities in which teens participate on the Internet. Some young people, of course, place themselves in physical danger, particularly with regard to pedophiles trolling the Web.

But the Web holds other traps too. As the story of Kiwi Camara indicates, the relative permanency of what all of us write and publish on the Internet can impact professional careers several years later, even to the extent of "career suicide." The childhood chant "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is no longer true. We live in the Information Age, and technology can find us out.

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