"It turns out that generous maternity leave and flexible rules on part-time work can make it harder for women to be promoted � or even hired at all."

Front page teaser for a NYT article titled "When Family-Friendly Policies Backfire."

Note that the unintended consequences are not limited to the working women who have children. Even women who intend to forgo motherhood and put all their effort into work are still going to look like potential mothers. 

The article ends with an effort at the upbeat:

Perhaps the most successful way to devise policies that help working families but avoid unintended consequences, people who study the issue say, is to make them gender neutral. In places like Sweden and Quebec, for instance, parental leave policies encourage both men and women to take time off for a new baby.

Yeah, well, but perhaps not. Who takes this encouragement to spend more time with babies? Who passes up this benefit because they feel they must press on in their career (and because they're not as interested in babies or because they're not the ones who can breastfeed)? I don't see how gender-neutral policies are going to avoid these unintended consequences.

"It was as if people secretly wished we could stow our child in cargo so that we would not disrupt their game of Candy Crush.'"

Writes the novelist Reif Larsen in a NYT op-ed about traveling with a little baby. That prompts what is most-favorited comment over there:

No, it is because everyone on that plane knows your child will be screaming for the next seven hours, because you decided that you must continue your pre-child life, at any expense to others. Small children like to be around familiar surroundings and get nothing whatsoever from their parents endless traveling.

Parents used to understand that having children came with sacrifices and did not entitle you to ruin the days of every person you came in contact with, whether in a confined space or at a pub or restaurant.

Just stop thinking you and your child are the center of the universe.

FYI: I say this as a mother of two.

The title of the op-ed is deceptive: "How Doing Nothing Became the Ultimate Family Vacation." Doing nothing would be staying at home and not working. Hang around. Take some walks. Read. Cook some food.

There is a bit about liking one trip to an all-inclusive hotel in Florida when the baby was 3 months old.

A part of me felt bad that he was coming into consciousness poolside, surrounded by overweight and sunburned Americans lightly drooling to Jimmy Buffett tunes, but hey � the world ain�t all pretty, kid.

I guess that's funny writing, but all I could think was: You can't expose a little baby to sun. What the hell were you doing?

I found myself desperate to feel like an adult again, even if only for an hour. Strange that adulthood equated to collecting about three towels too many from the towel boy, then elbowing my way to a prime spot on the deck so that I could slurp an overpriced pi�a colada and roast my pasty flesh while staring at the same page of a book for 20 minutes. And you know what? It was awesome.

You're drinking, avoiding the baby, avoiding your spouse, and getting sunburned. And this is presented as something that was done because of the baby, his usual preference being for the sort of vacation that enables you to claim to be "travelers and not tourists."

Yes, he rolls out that old trip tripe the first sentence. (For my extended discussion of the traveler/tourism clich�, see "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?")

"The city�s birthrate is steadily declining, but not among the affluent, and that rise is changing the feel of the city."

So says the teaser on the front page of the NYT that takes us to "Baby Boom Among New York�s Affluent," which is illustrated by this startling ad � anti-birth propaganda from the city:



"What happens to me?" = words the government puts in the mouth of the unborn child, who presumably has the opinion that she should not be born. And try to wade through the race-and-class politics of this:

Between 2004 and 2013, of all the racial groups that the city�s Health Department measures, birthrates increased only among whites. Beginning around 2010, as birthrates among whites started steadily to climb up, birthrates among blacks began to go down. In 2013, blacks had a birthrate of 12.7, the lowest of any group in the city, with the abortion rate four times as high among black women as among white women...

For decades there were factions on the right worried about poor minorities �overbreeding� and taxing the city�s resources. Historically, there has been far less panic about the affluent having a lot of children, and yet they change the feel of the city, driving family-size S.U.V.s and generating a more suburban sensibility. The main complaints have come from well-off people themselves, as they worry about overcrowding in affluent school districts and rising numbers of children attending private school, making admission even more impossible....

So the affluent white people end up sick even of themselves � or especially of themselves � and the NYT tries to amuse its affluent-white-female readership with this kicker:

Perhaps those ads could be recast and targeted at TriBeCa mothers with small children, warning them of the tough realities: �You may think you want a fourth child. But what if your husband never buys you that four-bedroom apartment and never says yes to the weekend nanny?�

ADDED: Two things:

1. Why pick on "factions on the right" who worried about "poor minorities" breeding when you've got an ad that plainly reveals that the city government � liberals � were actively fighting exactly that?

2. It's quite politically incorrect to portray a woman as looking to her husband to buy her a home and and a servant. Don't these upscale, affluent types have egalitarian marriages these days? I would have thought that TriBeCa mothers are equal partners in decisionmaking within their marriages. Why did that sexist stereotype suddenly appear? When does the NYT let its guard down?

"The parents of a girl born with a large birthmark on her leg have got matching tattoos in a show of support for their 18-month old daughter."

"There's not many people with that birthmark, so to us it is really, really unique. We love it and we are going to teach her to love it. We'll treasure it for ever, so even if hers does go she knows what was once on her leg."

ADDED: I ran across that by chance as I was researching the subject of anti-tattoo discrimination. On that topic, see: 

"Should anti-tattoo discrimination be illegal?"

"Tattoos are sad and stupid � we should discriminate against people with them."

"Dear fellow tattooed people: Lighten up/Are you really surprised that some people don't like your ink?"

"They weren�t thinking about me, just about my mother. They just ripped me out and tossed me aside," said Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra was a gigantic baby, the year was 1915, the setting was the family's kitchen, and the midwife had to call for the doctor, who arrived, with forceps, to save the mother. 

The doctor cut the cord and laid the boy - huge and blue, bleeding from his wounds, and apparently dead - by the kitchen sink, then quickly shifted his efforts to �saving the nearly unconscious mother�s life.

The women all leant in, shouting advice in �Italian. At the back of the scrum, one of them looked at the seemingly lifeless baby, picked up it up and, just in case, ran ice cold water from the sink over it and slapped its back. It snuffled and began to howl....

In a nightclub with a lover named Peggy Connelly, he flinched when, in the dark, she caressed his left cheek and her fingertips touched his ear. Though she had barely noticed the deformity, he told her how sensitive he was about it....

Connelly recalled: �There was no �outburst of emotion, just a �lingering bitterness about what he felt had been a stupid neglect of his infant self to concentrate on his mother, otherwise his torn ear might have been tended to in time.�

As for the mother, Dolly Sinatra:

After Frank was born, there were no more babies, possibly because the birth rendered Dolly unable to have any, but more likely because she �simply decided � and she was one of life�s deciders � she didn�t want to go through that again.

But she compensated for her trauma in the strangest of ways. She chose to become a midwife and an abortionist, for which �illegal activity she got the �nickname �Hatpin Dolly and a �criminal record.

The link goes to an excerpt from the book "Frank: The Making Of A Legend" by James Kaplan. I ran across that this morning because last night we were watching the new HBO documentary "Sinatra: All or Nothing at All," which isn't based on Kaplan's book, but goes through the same story of the birth and contains that brief, startling fact: Sinatra's mother was an abortionist.

We were watching the Sinatra documentary because we'd gotten tired of that other, much more noticed HBO documentary "Going Clear," which is based on the Lawrence Wright book "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief." I'm sure the book is much more worth your time. The movie is just too dumb for my taste. In the part I put up with, there were too many boring people on camera stating that they were indeed taken in. But why? Some of the clips of L. Ron Hubbard were interesting. He was brilliant/crazy/devious. He's a good character. The rest of the cast... well, one wonders what they would have done with their lives if they hadn't entered the "prison of belief" in Scientology.

I was surprised to see that both documentaries were made by the same guy, Alex Gibney. If he could have been allowed to stay with the interesting character in "Going Clear," I might have liked it as much as "Sinatra: All or Nothing at All." But left to delve into the mystery of ordinary people getting and staying inside of religious belief, he had little insight. At least not in the part I put up with.

Maybe I'll finish it at some point... or, more likely, switch to Wright's book or just Wright's New Yorker article, "The Apostate, Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology." I could get interested in Scientology's complicated legal problems, but I don't want to hear long accounts of dumb people getting trapped in "the Prison of Belief." Why are other people's beliefs a "prison"? If some beliefs are prisons, what beliefs are not prisons? Now, if the point is, the organization threatens and bullies anyone who tries to leave, then it's not belief that is the prison.

ADDED: Lawrence Wright goes on the podcast "Here's the Thing with Alec Baldwin" which I was in the middle of listening to when I tried to watch HBO's "Going Clear." This morning, having given up on "Going Clear," I went back to the podcast and was surprised to get to hear Alec Baldwin complain that what the movie was missing was just about exactly what I'd thought. Go to 23:32. Baldwin had seen the movie, and he said: "There wasn't any sense, to me, of: What are the people who are in Scientology, who remain in Scientology, who are dedicated to this, what do they perceive they're getting out of it?... What does it do for them? Why are they there?" Baldwin suggests "maybe it's in the book," and Wright is able to give some answers � but these are answers that make me want to ask whether the motivations are different from what brings people into other religions.

By the way, at the "Here's the Thing" site, the title of Wright's book is misstated as "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Unbelief." That's a good (if unwitting) response to my statement (above) it's not belief that is the prison.