Familienpolitik

Photo by Georgios Karamanis under Creative Commons license.

In this Slate article author Emily Bazelon asks a few questions about changes in American kindergartens that many upper-middle-class families don’t want to ask.  Is the increasingly academic nature of kindergarten good for my children?  Why are schools and states pushing up the cutoff date for kids starting kindergarten?  What’s the impact on the other kids in the class if I start my son or daughter in kindergarten at age six?

The answers are not good.

Individually speaking, no harm done, perhaps, though the presumed benefit is an open question. But collectively, delaying kindergarten is a bad idea—especially for poor kids, for whom it often means one more year of no school.

Based on research presented in a new paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Bazelon makes these worrisome points:

• Delaying some kids another year creates an age span in the classroom that disadvantages younger students, even if they are developing at the normal pace.
• Lifetime earnings are depressed for late starters because they also enter the workforce a year later than they would have.
• Delaying kindergarten means less public school for those kids who are risk for dropping out.  They turn 18 earlier in their educational career and are thus able to drop out after receiving less education

“All of this should make us leery of governmental policies that delay kindergarten,” writes Bazelon.  But when it comes to your own kid are you really going to worry about the effect on some general group of low-income kids somewhere in the country?  The authors of the study are now looking at whether there’s an advantage to late-starters at the other end.  Do 6-year-old kindergartners later have a better chance of getting into the top colleges?

Bazelon doesn’t mention it specifically, but my gut feeling is that accountability policies such as No Child Left Behind, which link school funding with student performance, may be driving schools to encourage parents to keep their kids home a year long in the hope that older children will do better on tests.  Based on Bazelon’s reporting, this might be short-sighted.

Tags: school

This weekend I finally finished a movie I started on a LAN flight from Madrid to Frankfurt almost a year ago. Daniel Burman’s Family Law (Derecho de familia) is a sweet look at an Argentinean law professor, his lawyer father and his young son. The film is mostly only related to this blog by its title but is worth adding to your Netflix list. Perhaps men are having more trouble figuring out what it means to be an engaged father and successful professional than we often think.

Tags: Argentina, fathers, film

I get my blog going again.

Coming soon: 5 Questions

I want to ask all sorts of people five basic questions about the family policy in their country, record the interviews and organize everything in a nifty little interactive map. Sound good? Just give me a few weeks.

When I blogged about the little Yemeni girl who filed for divorce from her 30-year-old husband by herself here, the story hadn’t been picked up by many major news outlets.  Now the New York Times has an in-depth story on how that girl and another are changing the way Yemenis look at child marriage.

“Voices are rising in society against this phenomenon and its catastrophes,” said Shawki al-Qadhi, an imam and opposition member in Parliament who has tried unsuccessfully to muster support for a legal ban on child marriage in Yemen in the past. “But despite rejections of it by many people and some religious scholars, it continues.”

Current law in Yemen allows girls to be married at any age as long as they do not live with their husbands until they have reached puberty.  As the two girls’ experiences described in the article underscore, this law is often not followed.  A total ban on underage marriage would protect girls better than the current situation, say activists.

Tags: Divorce, family policy, Underage marriage, Yemen

In Albania there is a code of conduct called the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini that has been passed on orally for more than 500 years. This code of conduct has traditionally put a woman’s value at half that of a man’s and limited her role to taking care of children and the home. But when a family had no male heir, the code allowed for women to take an oath of virginity and become men.

This fascinating New York Times article looks at this dying practice of women who become heads of their families by swearing off sex, cutting off their hair and taking on a male swagger. As gender roles become more equal and the violence that led to a shortage of men subsides, the number of sworn virgins is shrinking.

The article also includes a slide show with photographs of two of the last Albanian sworn virgins.

Tags: Albania, gender, virginity