Children and the environment

"I'm going to be a park ranger a--nd a violinist a--nd an artist!"
"How are you going to run 3 jobs all together?"
"First, in the morning, I'm going to look for people who're trying to kill animals and trees. Then, I'm going to play the violin to the animals in the forest. Last, I'm going to draw pictures of them."

Discussion by K and his mother S made me once again think about how children perceive the environment. I think all children are born environmentalists (no, there is no research done and I can't prove it since we don't grow in a vacuum and the influences of the parents and the rest of the world come into play really quickly.) Children, trees and animals belong together, and what more, environmental conservation tries to conserve the nature to future generations, that is, our children.

I could be like Kotaro too. Unfortunately I've been sort of passive in my environmental endeavors lately, reduced to shaking my head and complaining about things.

The part I don't get is who doesn't want to conserve the wild places and save wild animals (at least cool mammal-type animals)? I just heard the new House leadership (to those who don't know, the House of Representatives, being part of the US Congress that consists of the Senate and the House - why there are two I don't know, since it seems to make them just slower... some kind of leftover from the English system) decided to get styrofoam cups and plastic forks back into the cafeterias. (They did have valid-sounding reasons but I'm not buying.) Who would like to do such a thing? Or mountaintop removal mining, now renamed to make it sound better - who on earth would go and destroy a whole mountain to give us coal? You'd imagine people would try any other things first. Or, in Finland, the devastating clear cutting of forests? We noted that you cna hardly find a view between Kokemäki and Koli (the trip we took) that didn't have one area of clear cut forest sticking out like a sore thumb.

If Kotaro and his age group were in charge these things wouldn't happen.

As a philosopher (and not being Kotaro's age group) I have to be a realist and see things from different angles - I can see why many forest owners would cut their forests clear, or why the plastic forks came back, why coal is mined in a number of dirty ways and why bears and wolves are hated where ever they come in close proximity to humans. However, I'm saying none of these reasons (and I won't even start writing them here) are good enough. We need to save wild nature and bears and wolves for Kotaro. We need to keep the Appalachians intact (those we still can save at least). We need to try our best that humans don't influence the global temperatures so that the ice in the poles melts and polar bears have no more places to go. If we have to sacrifice to do this, so be it. Otherwise the children are left with just those parts of nature that manage in the environment humans have created even better than humans themselves: cockroaches and rats and those animals and birds that can survive on our refuse.

(I guess I need to be more active than just writing one blog a year about the subject.)

About working mothers and stay-at-home ones.

To Virpi

Helsingin Sanomat had a most provoking column a couple of days ago. I know Virpi Salmi, the author of the column, isn't alone with her thoughts, and wanted to write a response. I realize a true response needs to be longer than what I can write on the discussion page, so here goes. TO those of you who can read Finnish, here is Virpi's article.

Women have indeed a fairly equal situation to men here in Finland, but there is a difficulty. Virpi points out that when the government pays money for mothers to stay at home with their children until they are three years old, that causes many highly educated women to stay out of work during this time. For the advantage of the society women should go to work, says Virpi, not stay at home - unemployed as it is.

I think Virpi's writing points out another serious flaw in our (Finnish) society. (I'm referring to myself as a Finn in Finland in this blog despite not living there anymore.) We have, as most countries don't, a unique situation: a mother can choose to go to work or to stay at home with her child. In the US the situation is often one of financial realities: a mother staying at home has no income, so if the father doesn't make enough money for the family to survive the mother has to go to work too. However, in the US daycare is not free and can in fact be extremely expensive, so if there are no grandparents to help out it might be cheaper for the mother to stay at home after all, depending on her income level. Maternity leave is fairly short, depending on your place of employment, and you don't get paid during it. In Finland it's different - paid maternity leave can be up to a year and after that one of the parents can decide to stay at home with the child and be paid a small amount of money by the government, as a compensation for not putting the child in the free day care. Few fathers use this, but most mothers do. Those mothers who are career-oriented can go to work and use this same free day care system.

The flaw I see is this: in stead of being grateful about this system that our sisters in the 1970's and 1980's put up, we tend to guilt those who choose differently from us. Mothers who stay at home feel and sometimes even say that the others are not good mothers, without properly maternal feelings and so on. The mothers who work are equally vehement against their lazy counterparts at home. "Working mothers do the same as stay-at-home mothers but much more efficiently" - "Working mothers sacrifice their children for their career" etc. The children's good is used by one side then the other.

Why couldn't it be good for the child if the mother gets to do what she enjoys and is good at? And that isn't always a paying career, just saying.

Virpi think that what's good for the society is at least clear. I say it's not that clear at all - free child care costs a lot of money for the society. Mothers who stay at home don't get paid money and therefore don't pay taxes, but they save money for the society and often also for the household (although not necessarily, depending on what they do with their days...) The cheapest thing for the society would be for those to take care of the children who already can't work for some reason, namely retired grandparents and - sorry, Virpi - unemployed parents, friends or relatives. I have to point out that today's society seems to spit out quite a lot of unemployed people, so seems like there aren't quite enough jobs for even those highly educated women. The second cheapest measure would be for families to pay for childcare (but this would mean many couldn't afford it), or to put children in huge groups and have one adult preside over them, but this all agrees is cruel. Day cares need one adult for each five babies (didn't check this, might be less babies), otherwise we consider it a bad day care.

Is the education going to waste? In day cares in Finland most caretakers need a university degree - Masters. We seem to think raising children requires education. So maybe the problem is that the mothers have education in wrong fields? Well, probably neither Virpi nor anyone else feels the country should be filled with wanna-be mothers with only early childhood education degrees. In fact, I firmly believe that adequate education in almost any field gives a bonus in raising the next generation.

I say, let the families make their own decisions, hopefully well-informed, educated decisions but their own! Mothers can stay at home - let's be grateful about that - and fathers can too - but neither one of them has to. That's the system that was decided on by the idealistic builders of the well-fare state.

Bilinguality

... that can't be a real word, can it?

Been working on it. My boy doesn't talk yet but of course language development starts immediately when a baby is born if not earlier. I'm happy that I have two sisters with bilingual kids (Finnish-Swedish) so I know some things that work and others that don't work. I've also seen some Finnish mothers trying to teach their children Finnish in America. Comparing these is helpful. Here are some tips I've received or figured out myself:

If you want to raise a child bilingual you have to stick to it. It might offend friends or grandparents (hopefully not I:s grandparents) that they don't understand you when you speak to your child, but if you start making exceptions they will get more and more frequent until...

It's very difficult to raise a bilingual child in America. English is practically the only language they ever hear here, unless you watch Spanish TV (most don't), so they don't get exposed to many languages. Things are easier in Finland since they might hear TV in four-five languages.

If a child doesn't have a community of said language speakers (and the mother is the only one speaking it) he will grow up understanding it but will have an accent while speaking. (This creeps me out - how can you have an accent on your mothertongue, different from your mother's accent?)

The parents must always put extra effort to language-related things. You must speak good language because nobody else will... and also, you really have to speak all the time.

Books and films and things like that help a lot. I want to get a great Finnish library.

So, after all this trouble, why bother? Is it important in any way to be bilingual? Well, apart from the fact that knowing two languages actually helps you to learn more (the different structures of languages isn't so much a mystery, or the differences in pronounciation) or that it might be that bilinguality also boosts your language abilities in general (only if they're really strong languages both), there isn't much reason. Except that language and culture go together and I love my language and culture. I couldn't imagine that my children wouldn't be Finnish in both language and culture.

Being born liking cars?

Sorry, mothers, boys are not born liking cars. Otherwise, imagine all those little boys 200 or more years ago, liking them but not knowing what they like, a shapeless yearning... Nope, liking cars is not inborn and I will say this even if the first word of my boy happened to be 'auto'.

I've lately heard many feminist mothers (and some others too) complain (or just explain) how they worked hard on gender neutrality in toys and were thwarted in their efforts by their boy who wants cars. Or girl who wants to wear pink although the color isn't even present in their house. I still say liking cars isn't inborn!

If something is inborn about liking gender-specific toys (which I'm not certain about) it's the fascination of a certain gender role. Many boys might be excited in things that are culturally perceived as masculine (probably they don't explain it in these words to their parents, though). Not all, of course. And many girls might find overly feminine things attractive. What they see as masculine or feminine has to change, though, else boys would still just like horses and NOBODY would like cars.

And here comes the other part: if a child is attracted to things that are culturally perceived as masculine or feminine, and their parents were very vigilant in trying to raise their kids gender neutrally, what's the explanation? I think it's that there's no way you can raise your child actually gender neutrally. They don't grow in a vacuum - if you can be completely gender neutral (which I don't think is possible at all, but that's a whole different tweet) the rest of the world isn't.

I won't even try. But I think I'll go for trains in stead of cars, much more ecological. And animals, and dolls too if he wants them, and I think he'd be excited about a little kitchen. But I'll try not to complain if he only wants to play with his toy tigers and scorns the pots and pans.

Quotas or no quotas?

I'm a bit worried about gender quotas. If say a magazine has them, wouldn't it be possible that they would just be scrambling around to fill them instead of thinking of quality?

But if a magazine doesn't think about gender at all, will they end up not publishing any women writers just because they're much too used to their men? (Or for some other, more nefarious reason...) And will all the women writers then just end up writing in so-called women's magazines since they can't get in to any others?

This is what happened in the New Yorker. Anne Hayes noticed that in several issues (two were mentioned specifically) there were only a couple of pages written by women despite the fact that there are many writing women for them to have. In fact the magazine itself has many women editors. So Anne decided to return the latest offending issue, displeased with it, like a box of cereal that's flawed.

I think there should not be gender quotas - in a perfect world. In OUR world however, if women don't make a noise they are still overlooked. Still. And Anne's quota is so modest too, just five out of thirteen. Don't think five women writers should be hard to find at all, and quality need not suffer.

Here's Anne's letter on facebook.

Resolutions... wishes...

A couple of years ago I decided not to make any New Years resolutions. In stead I expressed New Years wishes. The good part is that those weren't really dependent on me. The downside is that the reason I did this is a Finnish ailment: pessimism. Why try to change since it didn't work last year? How could I do any better next year?

Well well. Last year I made resolutions anyway, even while realizing that I might not be able to fulfill them. I thought that two resolutions would be enough: I'd give birth to a baby (very safe: he was about to come out anyway) and I'd finally finish my novel, big project that has been going on for way too long. Not finished, I'm sad to say. It seems my first resolution messed with my second one. I started off fine but then got too heavy and tired and then too busy and then too tired again... you know how it is.

With a 50% success rate I might try again, however.

It seems like I've lately had trouble with faith-related issues, so I'll work on that. Decided.

Baby needs mama to give a strong foundation in the Finnish language. I'll work on that. Decided.

Novel still needs to be finished. (It can't be impossible with 250 pages down already?!) Decided.

What's the 50% success-rate for this I wonder? Slight improvement in faith-related issues, no novel but excellent use of Finnish? Or something else?

Language minorities

Sometimes I think we people are not very generous. Take the position of minority languages. In most countries minority languages have difficulties even existing. Russia is a great example. Even in a western country like the UK, Welsh and Gaelic are seriously struggling, and nobody knows how many generations will speak those languages fluently.

Then there's Finland and Canada. Finland has some struggling official minority languages (the Same languages in Lapland) and one official minority language that's not struggling in the same way, Swedish. Besides these there are of course several unofficial ones. The problem in the language majority's eyes seems to be the Swedish. Their situation in Finland is apparently very much like the French language situation in Canada. It's a second official language of the country, so anyone should get service in any government offices in Swedish. Also, as Swedish speaking Finns have to study Finnish at school, Finnish speaking Finns have to study Swedish. And they hate it so much! In fact, this hatred sometimes envelopes all the Swedish speaking Finns too. They are happier than Finns, they seem to be richer than Finns (this is only true about a small part of Swedish speaking Finns, but since those are the very visible ones...) and they sing better and even write better than Finns (well, at least Tove Jansson, Bo Carpelan and Kjell Westö do in my opinion)!

People hate minorities that do as well, or sometimes better in their eyes, as the majority. Minorities should suffer. Minorities should content themselves with speaking the majority language.

Only, as majority language speakers we have no clue how hard minority languages are to maintain. At school cool kids sometimes speak Finnish on breaks. If they didn't have their own schools - or were in the same complex even as Finnish speakers - how long until Swedish would only be spoken during lessons? And how many of those kids would eventually speak Finnish to their kids?

I was raised in a Swedish speaking village and went to a Swedish speaking school. Obviously, I'm partial. But I'm partial for the rights of other minority languages too. And, incidentally, I think Spanish should be compulsory at school in America!



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