Archives: September 2010

Trying to combine research I’m doing with my blogging efforts. Here are some quotes I found fascinating from James Garbarino’s Lost Boys:

According to recent statistics, each murder committed by an adolescent is matched by a suicide– about twenty-three hundred each year. And just as youth homicide rates have risen dramatically in recent decades, so too have youth suicide rates sky-rocketed–400 percent since 1950.

Robert Zagar and his colleagues published a paper that showcases the characteristics that increase a teenager’s risk of joining the ranks of boys who kill. Pg. 10:

• He comes from a family with a history of criminal violence.
• He has a history of being abused.
• He belongs to a gang.
• He abuses alcohol or drugs

“His odds triple when in addition to the aforementioned risk factors the following also apply:”

• He uses a weapon.
• He has been arrested.
• He has a neurological problem that impairs thinking and feeling.
• He has difficulties at school and has a poor attendance record.

Some of these apply more to fatherless kids than others. Child abuse for example, is much more common among children who are raised in a house with a man not biologically related to them. Here is a blog post of mine that further explores the Cinderella Effect. Weapons. Here is what Garbarino has to say about weapons: Read More

I’m lifting a chapter from James Garbarino’s book Lost Boys. The chapter is Rejected and Neglected, Ashamed and Depressed. The section is Does Parental Behavior Matter? Garbarino is making a point about the mental landscape of a young child that grows up to be violent. He is talking about early attachment and relationship development between the child and the parent. I’m sharing it to encourage everyone to read this book, and also because I think its beautiful and illustrates how vital connection is.

Does Parental Behavior Matter?

In her book The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris marshals theory and evidence to challenge the idea that parental behavior is the principal influence on child development. She offers voluminous evidence highlighting the role of what the child brings to the family (in the form of genetics) and what the family brings the child to (in the form of neighborhood and school influences that have their effects through peer groups). Harris cites studies that show that parental behavior has little direct effect on the various themes in a child’s life–academic achievement, personality, talents, and moral behavior–once genetic similarity, peer groups, siblings, and other experiences outside the parent-child relationship are taken into consideration. Thus, she reasons, the effect of parents is very much indirect…

Parents do matter, however (as Harris acknowledges). Parents choose or otherwise influence where children live and how often they move–and thus who their peers are and how stable their relationships with those peers are. Parents decide how many siblings a child will have–and thus the extent to which they have a peer group in the family. It is the actions of parents that determine the social class of children and which school they will attend– and thus the opportunities and expectations that will surround them as they  make their way in the world outside the home. Thus, much of the effects of the parents is not to be found in the subtle ways they directly shape the personality of a child but in the bigger picture of how parental behavior organizes that child’s life. Read More

The writer Jill Johnston has died, at the age of 81.  From her obit in today’s NYTs:

In the early 1970s she began championing the cause of lesbian feminism, arguing in “Lesbian Nation” (1973) for a complete break with men and with male-dominated capitalist institutions. She defined female relations with the opposite sex as a form of collaboration.  “Once I understood the feminist doctrines, a lesbian separatist position seemed the commonsensical position, especially since, conveniently, I was an L-person,” she told The Gay and Lesbian Review in 2006. “Women wanted to remove their support from men, the ‘enemy’ in a movement for reform, power and self-determination.

And this too:

Jill Johnston was born on May 17, 1929, in London and taken to the United States as an infant by her mother, Olive Crowe, after her father abandoned them both. She was reared by a grandmother in Little Neck, on Long Island. Throughout her childhood she believed that her parents had divorced, but in 1950, when The New York Times ran a short obituary about her father, an English bell maker named Cyril F. Johnston, she learned the truth. Her mother informed her that she and Johnston had never married. A lifelong fascination with this absent figure, whose company, Gillett & Johnston, supplied bells and carillons to churches and cathedrals all over the world, motivated her to write “England’s Child: The Carillon and the Casting of Big Bells” (2008), a biography of her father and a history of bell making.

In reading the comments on how we forge new possibilities in conversation with new expressions of what is ideal, my thoughts went back to my days as a ballet dancer. How the music and the mirror were constant companions in the journey of joyous, inspired expression partnered with disciplined critique of the self.

Thinking of dance makes me not only wax philosophical about how we create meaning in life but also think of Patrick Swayze.  And who doesn’t like to think of Patrick Swayze?  Most women in my generation fell in love with Patrick, denim jean shorts, and Keds with no socks at a most impressionable age.  And most, like me, watched Jennifer Grey, our beloved “Baby-who-is-not-in-the-corner” from Dirty Dancing, on Dancing with the Stars last night and found ourselves teary-eyed.  We resonate with the emotions expressed by Jennifer during the filming of her training in the studio when she hears their performance music for the first time: a song from the film, “These Arms of Mine.”  As she breaks down in sobs, she says to her new partner, “I was just fine and then I hear the song and in a moment I am not fine.  He was so young, just like you, and now he is gone.  How does that happen?”

Jennifer’s question resonates with questions we hear all the time from grieving individuals.  The ways that grief can sneak up on us in a song, a smell, a picture. The ways that our minds are unable to fully process that our loved one is gone.

In the most recent issue of People magazine Patrick Swayze’s widow, Lisa Niemi, paints a picture of where she is in her grief journey.  Only 10 months since his death, she tells the story of his last days, how they brought him home from the hospital with hospice because she felt that home was where he would have wanted to be.  He died peacefully a week later surrounded by family and friends.  Although unique to her, her story of how she trips and starts in attempting to create new meaning after loss resonates with many whose spouse has died.  She tells of how she still instinctively texts “I love you” to Patrick’s cell phone number when she boards an airplane.  The texts never come back, so she imagines him mystically reading them.  How, until just recently, she had not ridden his favorite horse, but simply placed his empty boots in the horse’s saddle backwards, as a memorial to him. 

In the midst of the waves of death and grief, we who are of willing and able mind, body and spirit are privileged to spend our days in the pursuit of rearranging our lives to reflect the lessons of the ideal to which we are exposed.  Though the music can be an intoxicating muse and the mirror can be harsh reproach, truth lies somewhere in the middle.  Perhaps in a song, a smell, a dance.

A FamilyScholars reader sent me a note about this website. He imagined it would be hard for some among us who do not know their bio parents to see.

And yet, I want to link to it, because it’s a piece of cultural ephemera testifying to how we think about our bodies and where they come from… how bodies matter…

On This American Life, episode 214: Family Physics, a man doesn’t discover who his real biological father is until adulthood. He describes the day he first met his father:

All those times I looked through photo albums trying to find a relative that looked like me… Well all of a sudden I was looking at his legs and his shoulders and even the way he moved, and it was like I was looking at my legs and my shoulders.

Enjoy.