how do i convince my husband
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how do i convince my husband
| Mon, 07-18-2005 - 4:09pm |
how do i convince my husband to let me at least job-share so i can take care of our 3 month old dd? he grew up with his mom working & all his friend's moms working. we can afford it if we cut back on some things, but he doesn't want to cut back & just doesn't understand someone wanting to be a stay at home mom...it doesn't help mycause that the grandmothers will babysit. i'm so unhappy about having to go back to work...he wants me to work full time 1 more year & just doesn't get it! i feel like my heart is being ripped from my chest every time i hink about it.

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But she just didn't own the coffee shop, she searched it out, bought it with her earnings and then planted the coffee shop so to speak.
PumpkinAngel
Laura, Laura, Laura,
I'm in over my head here. I'd love to give you some meat to sink your teeth into but I can't. I don't know enough about the topic to do so.
The Nurture Assumption doesn't go on at length about language or the learning of multiple languages (or even the acquisition of accent-less language by immigrant children.) So I wouldn't hold the author accountable for my less-than-stellar interpretations of her "examples" related to language (which I may have very well botched if it got you all up in arms.) It is a fascinating book, an eye-opening one, and you should read it because it makes you think about parenting differently and the way psychologists (and Parenting Experts) are hell-bent in keeping their long-standing notions about parents providing the prime socialization for children. It threatened a lot of my firmly held beliefs about parenting, but ultimately, in a good way. And many of my beliefs survived and were made stronger when I didn't accept her premise whole-hog.
The forward is written by a guy named Steven Pinker. If I had time, I'd Google him but I don't so I'm sorry if he is some kind of discredited crackpot. He writes: "I study language development: how children acquire a grammatical rule system from the parental input, as we say in the business. A strange factoid in our True-but-Inconvenient file is the children always end up with the language and accent of their peers, not of their parents. No one in psycholinguistics has ever called attention to this fact, let alone explained it. But here was a theory (Harris's) that did."
"Other facts about language fit Harris's theory, too. Children lean a language even in the many cultures in which adults don't speak to them; they do just fine listening to their slightly older peers. Children who are not exposed to a full-blown grammatical language from adults can create one among themselves. And children of immigrants pick up the language from the playground so well that they are soon ridiculing their parents' grammatical errors."
I don't know if that helps at all.
The only other thing I wanted to say was that Harris's mentioning of code-switching is pretty interesting because she is trying to establish that people act differently in different social contexts which is important in her theory that peers influence more than parents. She is saying that language is an aspect of social behavior and that children will modify their language depending on who they are with (regardless of whether they are bilingual or not.) She says, "Though it is a social behavior, language has the advantage of being free of the genetic complications that plague other kinds of social behaviors. The tendency to be agreeable or aggressive is partly genetic, but the tendency to speak Polish rather than English, or to use swear words with some people and not with others, is entirely environmental."
So part of the purpose of her foray into language is to "sweat out" the genetic component of social behaviors, where she can.
She does say, "Code-switching is an extreme example; most children's mental tanks do quite a bit of leaking. After all, they carry their memories with them wherever they go, from one context to another." I don't think she is using the term in the exact same way it is used in linguistics but I don't know.
How's that for muddying things up?
I've enjoyed your comments. I'm sure somewhere somehow Judith Rich Harris is pissed as all get out that I've tried to explain her book!
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The *method* is of no import, one way or another, unto itself. Its convenience is determined by the lifestyle into which it must fit. Compared to bottle feeding, it would in very few situations and times, have been more convenient to breast feed than bottle feed. There is nothing convenient about a healthy adult capable of doing the work necessary to keep a family alive, being required to function as a baby bottle on the side. Feeding babies does not impvrove ones manual labour output. And decreased production does not improve the situation for a family. Breast feeding is merely good enough to keep enough babies fed and able to reach reproduction age to keep the species from dying out. Thats all.
<<...I'd say it was common for wetnurses to be used in some periods of history, but not that it was common to share by avab. lactating women (which to me denotes more of a tribal culture where any woman would just randomly pick up anyone's hungry baby to nurse...) >>
You'd be wrong on all counts.
Karen
"A pocketknife is like a melody;sharp in some places,
flat in others,
and really annoying when it's stuck in your head."
Karen
"A pocketknife is like a melody;sharp in some places,
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