The Rake Magazine

Tag: parenting

  • The Death and Life of American Imagination

    In February 1953, a violent North Sea storm crashed through the Dutch levee system, killing 1,835 people and leaving a hundred thousand others homeless. In the aftermath, the country responded by building the Delta Works, the world’s most sophisticated system of flood defenses. According to John McQuaid, a reporter for Mother Jones on assignment in the Netherlands, the system is “engineered to a safety standard 100 times more stringent than the current goal (not yet achieved) for New Orleans’ most heavily populated areas. Even Dutch pasturelands have more protection than the Big Easy.” As one government engineer told McQuaid, conceiving and building the Delta Works “was like putting a man on the moon.”

    That was half a century ago. Why the disparity between what the Dutch could accomplish then, and what the U.S. (the country that did put a man on the moon) has conceived to protect New Orleans, one of its most historic and treasured cities, and the surrounding region? You can call it foresight, or innovation, but beyond that, what the Dutch response required—and where we appear to be failing in our response to the aftermath of Katrina—was tremendous imagination.

    Imagination is an intangible, unlimited, and free resource. It is not, at least for the purposes of this discussion, the same as fantasy, where universal laws cease to apply, where elephants might speak Latin or humans travel back in time. Nor is imagination reserved for artistic pursuits, though imagination is the core of creativity. Applying imagination to problem-solving requires the ability to come up with an idea, and to break that idea down into the steps that will bring it to fruition. It also requires an alchemical mix of will, vision, discipline, and action, not to mention stubborn perseverance in the face of frustration or opposition.

    A prime example of this use of imagination would be George Hotz, the seventeen-year-old who spent all summer cracking Apple’s iPhone; he broke the lock that tied the phone to AT&T’s wireless network and freed it for use on other carriers’ networks, even overseas ones. Hotz spent five hundred hours with four online collaborators, and was motivated by the challenge and by “fun.”

    Presently, imagination of this sort is very much in demand. One wake-up call to the erosion of imagination in American culture came in 2004, when “failure of imagination” was cited in the 9/11 commission report as the primary reason U.S. officials misjudged the threat of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Maybe government officials couldn’t imagine terrorists flying planes into the World Trade Center, but plenty of others could and did—and not just those who actually carried out the long-planned and highly complex attack. The ability to prevent terrorist attacks depends on leaders who are as imaginative as those who would carry them out.

    While imagination is one key to national security, it’s also crucial to economic security. In 2004, executives at leading technology companies like Dell, Cypress Semiconductor, and IBM spoke to Lee Todd, president of the University of Kentucky, about creating sustainable jobs for the U.S. in the years to come. All said the same thing, according to Todd: Imagination and creativity represent the future of the U.S. economy. On a broader level, the World Economic Forum chose “The Creative Imperative” as the theme for its 2006 conference in Davos, Switzerland. Writers like Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, point to the new “imagination economy” as a trend that’s just taking off. He sees it in quite simple terms: “People have to be able to do something that can’t be outsourced,” Pink told me. “Something that’s hard to automate and that delivers on the growing demand for nonmaterial things like stories and design. Typically these are things we associate with the right side of the brain, with artistic and empathetic and playful sorts of abilities.”

    Government leaders in education are joining the chorus, too. “American education’s single-minded focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (‘STEM’ subjects) is admirable but misguided,” wrote two former assistant U.S. secretaries of education in the August 12 issue of The Wall Street Journal Online. What makes America competitive in a shrinking global economy, they claimed, is “our people’s creativity, versatility, imagination, restlessness, energy, ambition, and problem-solving prowess.” As they summed it up, true success—economic, civic, cultural, domestic, military—depends on a broadly educated populace with “flowers and leaves as well as stems.”

  • Love Knows No Borders

    Viewed from room 1238 of the White Swan Hotel, the jagged ten-story tenements of Guangzhou, China, are softened by smog. Below, the United States Consulate complex sprawls beside century-old British colonial structures. “Pretty good view, isn’t it?” asks Paul Stueber, an earnest forty-four-year-old drum instructor from Minneapolis. He packs a baby bottle into a blue backpack. Beside him, his wife, Laurel, a forty-year-old schoolteacher, holds their newly adopted daughter, Olivia Ya Qun Stueber, age approximately fourteen months.

    “You have our passports, Paul?”

    “Yeah, I think I’ve got everything.”

    Paul makes a last, quick scan of the room where they have spent four days awaiting Olivia’s immigrant visa. The bed is covered with toys. A crib stands beside it. A folder stuffed thick with adoption-related documents is on the dresser. The Stuebers ride a dimly lit elevator car to the ground floor and join five families with whom they have spent the last two weeks traveling southern China. “Hey, Laurel,” exclaims an exuberant mother from Stillwater, her arms filled with her own infant Chinese daughter. “How’s Olivia?” The Stuebers merge into a mass group status report on feeding times, sleep schedules, colds, parent-child attachment, and current levels of apprehension regarding the transportation of the group’s six newly adopted children on long international flights.

    Unnoticed, the elevator discharges a young Chinese businessman and his two elderly parents. At first they don’t hesitate at the sight of white faces (the White Swan is favored by foreign businesspeople), but when the mother notices the Chinese babies, she stops mid-step, mouth agape. She and her family whisper through astonished smiles, and begin a slow circuit of the group, gazing upon them as if they were fine statuary. “Fat and healthy,” the mother declares in Mandarin. “Very good,” she adds in English, with a thumbs-up that is reciprocated by one of the new fathers.

    The elevator opens again and out walks Shirley Hu, a diminutive China-based adoption representative for Children’s Home Society and Family Services, a Minnesota-based agency providing adoption services across the U.S. “Everyone have passports?” The families fall behind her in a line out the door and into the lush colonial elegance of Shamian Island. “Families always call me Mother Duck,” confides the thirty-one-year-old Shanghai native, her voice rising into a giggle. “I hate it!” She walks in rapid, evenly paced steps, shoulders back, chin raised, and she never looks back. “They will not let me out of their sight,” she says with a confidence derived from leading hundreds of adoption groups through China.

    They pass dozens of American parents strolling with newly adopted Chinese babies and bypass shops with English language signs (Jenny’s Place, Susan’s Place) jammed with overpriced souvenirs and laundry services priced to beat the White Swan’s. At a parkway, they turn left and approach a long line of visa applicants awaiting interviews at the Consulate. Shirley walks right past them and shows the guard her passport and appointment letter. Immediately, she and the group are cleared to continue into a low-slung building where bags are X-rayed and everyone walks through a metal detector before crossing a courtyard and entering the ten-story consulate building.

    Inside, past another security checkpoint, a sign announces “American Citizen Section; Adoption Unit; Department Homeland Security.” Arrows point upstairs into a thirty-foot-long room dominated by a service counter and, behind it, the Adoption Unit’s office cubicles. Approximately twenty other families are already in the room, awaiting the oath that completes their adoptions. Shirley’s families are ushered to a small window where a secretary checks their passports against the consulate’s documents. When this is done, an American woman emerges from the offices with a microphone. “You are to be congratulated on completing this process and adopting your children,” she says, her voice broadcast through the room. “There’s only one last hoop to jump through. Please raise your right hand.” She pauses. “Do you swear or affirm that the information you provided the consulate is true and correct to the best of your knowledge?”

    The room rumbles with unsynchronized yeses and I dos.

    “Congratulations. Have a safe trip home.”

    At the far end of the room Laurel smiles at Olivia and coos, “Congratulations, sweetheart.” Paul places his right index finger into Olivia’s tiny left hand. “We’re going home,” he says in a high-pitched baby-talk voice.

    U.S. citizens adopt more Chinese orphans than children of any other nationality except their own, and it is a growing phenomenon. Since 1995, more than thirty-three thousand Chinese orphans have been granted visas to immigrate to the United States; in 2004 alone, 6,910 Chinese orphans, including Olivia Ya Qun Stueber, were granted immigrant status. “It seems like everyone I know happens to know somebody who wanted to talk to me about what it was like when they adopted in China,” explained a mother who was part of the Stuebers’ adoption group. “This is just not so weird anymore.”

    Paul and Laurel Stueber are not unusual adoptive parents; Ya Qun Luo is not an unusual Chinese orphan. The process by which they were declared a family was long ago organized into a set of steps, particularly in China, that can be precisely charted on a timeline. But just like a healthy pregnancy, that predictable process inevitably acquired its own unique narrative and personality.

    Around the corner from Southwest High School in Minneapolis is a tidy white bungalow. Solar lanterns line the straight front walkway, and directly in front of the house, hostas and lilies poke out in symmetrical rows. Though close to a school, the yard is unmarred by plastic toys or stroller wheels or sidewalk chalk.

    There is, however, one small sticker affixed to the front door, reminding firefighters of the pets inside—two pampered cats. Laurel Stueber gently brushes them from the couch before joining Paul on the love seat with a cup of hot coffee and soy milk. On the coffee table are two photographs of the little girl whom the Stuebers have yet to meet but are already beginning to call their daughter. “That’s our baby, that’s our child,” says Laurel. “Now she’s real. You see her face, you know who she is,” she continues, becoming tearful. “The waiting is so much harder because you know she’s there, you want to see her and hold her and find out everything about her and all you have is what’s written on the paper. So we look at her picture every day, and we miss her. It’s hard. It’s hard to wait.”

    That same anticipation permeates the small corner bedroom that awaits Olivia Ya Qun. The walls are a glowing salmon color, and the sheer appliquéd curtains grazing the oak floor are pulled back to allow the sun to shine through white mini-blinds. Two antique wooden dressers are polished to a gleam, and in the corner near the window sits the fully dressed crib. Despite the loving appointments, the room is, more than anything else, occupied by emptiness.

    “We had tried for a few years to have a child,” explains Laurel, “and then I was diagnosed with endometriosis. I was thirty-eight.” After a dizzying introduction to all the options for fertility treatments, potential surgeries, and the attendant odds and risks, the Stuebers turned away. “You’re considered high-risk for pregnancy at my age, and so you’re told about everything that might go wrong,” she says. “We considered all that, and the fact that fertility treatments don’t always work. We knew it wasn’t for us. We felt more comfortable with adoption, and we were drawn to international adoption right from the start.”

    The retelling is so matter-of-fact it makes it sound as if the decision to forgo childbirth was easy and painless. It wasn’t. “I didn’t have to grieve, exactly, over deciding between fertility treatments and adoption, because I did have—I did have a child that was stillborn several years before that,” says Laurel. She is staring to her left, beyond the picture window, and her eyes are filled with tears again. The cat jumps up beside her. “I just didn’t want to go through—.” Laurel stops and waits until she can speak again. “I was twenty-six or twenty-seven at the time. I had to go through birth in my fifth month, knowing. We just let it go after that, we didn’t really try. I wasn’t ready. We wanted to make sure we were stable in our careers. We just said for now we’re going to go on with our lives and so forth. Then when we were finally ready to try again, nothing happened.”

    Doctors determined that the stillborn child’s kidneys had failed to develop due to a rare abnormality. “They said it wasn’t genetic, just one of those odd things. But it was such a devastating blow, and then when you hear all the scary statistics, all the things that can happen when you get pregnant at an older age—I just didn’t want to go through that again. We were ready for a child and it wasn’t that important that it be a biological child. We just wanted a child to complete our family.”

  • Hormones on Overdrive

    It’s another spring evening at the Mall of America, where the Glitz
    store is in full bloom with taffeta and tulle. Pastel Cinderella
    dresses glimmer under the fluorescent lights, and the skirts bursting
    from these sleeveless bodices are so lush, they make the satin wedding
    gown I wore fourteen years ago seem downright drab. I touch the
    bejeweled outer layer of a particularly lovely dress, and then I see
    its $298 price tag, which further confirms the dowdiness of my own
    once-upon-a-time princess costume (now stored dutifully in a cardboard
    box in the basement, for posterity).

    In any case, I’m not here for a dress, but for the teenagers who buzz
    around me, circling the racks and ducking in and out of dressing rooms
    with their selections. I’ve already spent countless hours in
    legitimate, moderated teen chat rooms, marveling at the banter among
    twelve- to fifteen-year-old boys and girls. Most recently they’ve been
    asking each other for advice about whether or not to have sex, what to
    do if your dad thinks you’re a ’ho, how to get a girl back, combating
    lust, and whether boys prefer shaved pubic hair on girls. Now I’m
    hoping to break out of the close, sweaty space of these anonymous chats
    and talk to some local teens face to face. I see a friendly looking
    girl at the rack with the jeweled skirt and I make my move.

    Melissa, it turns out, is a junior from Lafayette, Minnesota
    (population 529), and she’s here shopping for the prom. She doesn’t
    have a date yet, but she plans to go either way, because, as she
    explains, prom is a very big deal. “I guess girls like to get all
    dolled up, it makes us feel important,” she told me shyly, averting her
    gaze. When I asked if she thought there would be drinking and drugs and
    sex at the prom, she looked a bit wounded. “No, I don’t think we really
    have that kind of thing,” she said.

    Of the fifteen or so kids in my highly unscientific sampling at the
    mall that night, Melissa, the shy girl sporting a mouthful of braces
    and little or no make-up on her almost clear skin, was the only one who
    expressed such reassuring naivete.

    If the lilac buds outside my window pop open today, then others were
    blooming yesterday along roadsides approximately seventeen miles south
    of here, and still more will be doing so tomorrow seventeen miles
    northward. Spring rolls along at a pleasantly predictable pace year
    after year, global warming or no. As it arrives, it greens the lawns,
    buds the trees, and transforms winter’s faded trash into dirty
    pinwheels to blow in the wind. Spring also heralds prom night, a
    cultural relic that UrbanDictionary.com now defines as an “unusual
    American custom in which otherwise Puritanical just-say-no parents
    support, tolerate, approve of, or feign ignorance and/or disapproval of
    teenage public drunkenness, destruction of hotel property, and lewd
    behavior.”

    Today’s proms are not at all the crepe paper-and-punch affairs of times
    past. As the premiere social events of the teen season and the last
    hurrah of adolescence, today’s over-the-top, limo- and hotel-enhanced,
    booze- and sex-soaked proms might even be viewed as emblematic of the
    way everything about American adolescence has changed. And adolescence
    has changed, in that it now lasts for all of about twenty minutes—or
    twenty years, depending on how you look at it. We simultaneously want
    to accelerate childhood into adulthood, and spend our adulthood
    resisting the trappings of age and idolizing and emulating youth.

    American adolescence is both the shortest and the longest it has ever
    been at any point in history, which isn’t saying all that much, since
    the term “teenager” with all its associated connotations was only first
    coined in 1942—prior to which the notion of an extended passage between
    childhood and adulthood had yet to be embraced in ideological or
    practical terms.

    Modern adolescence has been defined as lasting until anywhere between
    age nineteen and thirty-four (the latter being the age of adulthood, as
    pinpointed by the $3.4 million “Transitions to Adulthood” project,
    funded by the MacArthur Foundation). Known as the Peter Pan syndrome,
    the trend of extended adolescence is represented by a growing number of
    twenty-somethings who depend on their parents well past the point of
    legal adulthood. According to the Institute for Social Research at the
    University of Michigan, the number of young adults in their twenties
    living at home with their parents increased by fifty percent between
    1970 and 1990. Today, sixty-three percent of college students say they
    plan to live with their parents after graduation.

    Meanwhile, when does adolescence start? Scientists have noticed that
    this physiological phase begins as much as a year earlier with each
    passing generation. And younger adolescents’ exposure to sex, drugs,
    alcohol, and independence from parental authority is becoming more
    widespread and intense. Increasingly younger children are taking up the
    outer vestments of teendom. Meanwhile, the physical signs of puberty
    are also creeping down to affect eight-, seven-, even six-year-old
    girls (and the newest research suggests the age of puberty is also
    falling for boys). A century ago, the average age for a girl’s first
    period, or menarche, was about seventeen. Menarche now hits girls
    between twelve and thirteen. Alcohol, drugs, and sex are now typical,
    rather than exceptional, components of modern adolescence. Social
    research also shows the most influential forces in the lives of many
    teens shifting from family to peer culture, including the media, at
    younger and younger ages. This is not restricted to urban settings.
    Suburban high school students have sex, drink, smoke, use illegal
    drugs, and engage in delinquent behavior as often as urban public high
    school kids. This is according to senior researchers at the Manhattan
    Institute, who drew their findings from the National Longitudinal Study
    of Adolescent Health—one of the most comprehensive and rigorous studies
    of American high school students. Regardless of where they live,
    students also engage in these behaviors much more often than most
    people realize.

    The American press is saturated with stories about the “crisis of
    adolescence,” with new headlines literally every day. And then, every
    so often, someone cries foul, protesting all the fuss: “Shut up,
    already. They’re teenagers! Teenagers have always been reckless and
    there never were any good old days, so get over it!”

    It’s an appealing sentiment, in a way. If we accept it at face value,
    we can let out a guilty little sigh and go back to business as usual,
    convinced that things are not, after all, so bad out there—and
    certainly not so much worse then when we were kids. This denial ought
    to hold up for as long as it takes to read the facts from a recent slew
    of news stories: The U.S. has the highest rates of teen pregnancy and
    births (and abortions) in the western industrialized world. Half of all
    fourteen-year-olds have been to a party with alcohol. Self-harm
    (cutting) is increasing among children as young as six. More than
    79,000 teens under eighteen received cosmetic surgery in 2001, and
    3,682 of those got fake breasts—up from 392 in 1994. Almost half of
    fourteen-year-olds report current drinking behavior; about a quarter
    report heavy drinking and marijuana use. Girls as young as twelve are
    reporting pressure to have sex. Twenty percent of twelve- to
    fourteen-year-olds have had sex. The percentage of sexually active
    eighteen-year-olds has risen steadily from twenty-three percent in 1959
    to eighty percent in 1999. Sixty-six percent of all high school seniors
    have had sex. Half of all young people report experience with oral
    sex—which they, like Bill Clinton, don’t define as “sex.” American kids
    spend twenty-eight hours per week watching television. Childhood
    obesity has hit an all-time high. About three quarters of teens believe
    that the actions of other teens are influenced by the sexual behavior
    seen on television. Sixty-five percent of the sexually transmitted
    diseases diagnosed this year will be among people under twenty-five. A
    statewide study shows that ten percent of adolescent males in Minnesota
    have chlamydia. Teens are five times more likely to get herpes today
    than in 1970, and because most teens think oral sex is safe, record
    numbers of teens are contracting a strain of mouth herpes that was once
    associated only with genitals.

    The story spins out as far as you can follow it and beyond, and in the
    end it should force us to wonder if, after all this, the kids are all
    right.