When Helaine Olen gave birth, she knew nothing about bringing up children. At first she tried to go along with the parenting flow around her, going from Music Together sessions to RIE classes, all in the hopes of raising the perfect child. But when her son foiled her yet again by falling asleep in his car seat and missing class, Helaine decided to call her mother on her cell to pass the time. Listening to her mom’s ten-minute soliloquy-like response to the polite question “How are you?,” Olen suddenly had a parenting epiphany at the exact moment her mother said, “I didn’t want to worry you but I had a biopsy yesterday. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. They don’t think it’s malignant. I didn’t call you. I didn’t want to worry you. What’s wrong with the baby that he fell asleep in the car? Is he sick? Does he have a fever? Did you feed him?”

She did know how to parent a child, one who could be self-obsessed and self-sacrificing at the same time, as well as in love with the sound of his own voice and uniquely oblivious to any social cue.

Olen turned to the wisdom of her mother, grandmother and generations of women from an ancient tribe before her in an effort to raise the perfect child. And now that her children have graduated from second grade, she’s willing to share the secrets of her mothering success with you. Topics addressed include:

Let Me Feel Your Keppe: Inculcating an Obsession with Health and Odd Ailments at an Early Age

The Art of the Interruption: How to Teach Your Children to Insert Themselves into Any Adult Conversation with Comments that Have Nothing to Do With the Topic at Hand.

Are You Hungry?:  Why It’s OK to Make Separate Meals for Every Member of the House at all Hours of the Day or Night

How Could You Do This to Me?: The Art of Explaining Your Own Self-Sacrifice to Your Children and Why They Shouldn’t Worry About It

Do You Think I’m Made of Money?: How to Teach Your Children the Fine Arts of Materialism and Financial Dependence at a Young Age.

I spent much of my life hiding my love for the easy listening folk rock of the 1970s.  As a genre, it gets little respect. Disco has gone from cultural joke to being considered the iconic music of a gay sub-culture that was unknowingly dancing on the edge of an apocalypse. Bruce Springsteen and the like will always get respect. Punk and new wave, with their angry anarchy, became the music of leftwing intellectuals everywhere as the Free to Be … You and Me era ended in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Folk rock, on the other hand, is marked by an earnestness and sincerity that plays as hokey in our more ironic age. It’s often about failure, which might also be why it gets little respect since we are, after all, a society that’s uncomfortable with anything but tales of triumphant progress. Much of folk rock describes how things did not work out. And no one got all that better than Chapin, a man who, despite the love of family, friends and fans, understood loneliness and despair.

My introduction to Harry Chapin came via my parents. My mother was (and still pretty much is) a rabid Chapin fan, and one who figured out it was easier to buy me a ticket for his concerts than to hire a babysitter. As a result, I saw any number of Chapin performances with the parents, but the only one that I can recall with any precision was in what I believe was St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn Heights, where we arrived early enough to snag the front pew. It was a joyous occasion, with much singing along by the audience and laughter.

In a decade that celebrated the self, Chapin sang about strangers. He had an ability to capture the lives of others in a way that suggests in another age he might well have been a novelist. He brought to life the forgotten and forlorn, like the midnight watchman and the overweight barmaid of A Better Place to Be, John Joseph and the nameless narrator of Corey’s Coming, the crazed whaler’s widow of Dogtown and too many others to list here. Chapin’s songs are five to ten minute tales of loss, rejection and the human ability to find hope and salvation in the worst circumstances. It’s music for adults.

Today we live in a world of frantic activity, one that is designed to cover-up our loneliness, increasing isolation and financial precariousness. We’re busy, busy, busy but bowling alone and bowling scared. Harry Chapin, I suspect, could have written many great songs capturing our current reality. If only, to paraphrase a line from Circle, we could have gone round with him one more time.

Addendum

Two other terrific remembrances of Harry Chapin:

Aaron Goldstein at The American Spectator

Neil Steinberg at The Chicago Sun-Times

This, of course, assumes there is a large group of people out there, who would otherwise work till age 65 or 67, but are simply lazy and waiting to take their Social Security benefits so they can put a bumper sticker on their car proclaiming “I’m Spending my Children’s Inheritance,” move to Leisure World and enjoy the senior vida loca.

This is a wrong assumption.

I’ve spent the past several weeks speaking with several of my former Los Angeles Times Money Makeover subjects for my book on the post-2008 world of personal finance.  Many are now in their fifties and sixties, and several have indicated to me that they plan to take Social Security ages that AARP would no doubt deem less than optimum.

They are not slackers. They are people who, rather, are suffering from the vicissitudes of life in 2011. If they are unemployed, they are much less likely to find work than people younger than themselves. Others fear they won’t be able to keep up much longer. As economists know, our nation’s productivity gains have been made by longer hours – men in professional and managerial jobs often put in 50-hour workweeks. Contrary to the wishes of desk jockeys in Washington, DC, there really aren’t that many people in there sixties capable of putting in punishing hours on the job. Yes, we are living longer, but it isn’t clear we are living healthier. Sixty ain’t the new 40 or even the new 50, and no amount of wishing is going to make it so.

My Makeover people run the gamut. One told me he was concerned he would not be able to perform his job safely in another year or two. Another told me she wasn’t sure she could put in the hours much longer – and, even if she could, felt that technological changes in her industry might render her job non-essential in the near future. A third, who had continued to teach infant education classes on a part time basis into her seventies, finally had to stop when she physically could no longer pick up the children’s toys. Still others are part of that 50something cohort who simply can’t get hired to anything but the most piecemeal of piecemeal work. And, finally, another group finds themselves losing hours of work caring for sick parents or spouses,  an increasing problem according to, yes, AARP, which is releasing a report Monday on the subject.

In other words, I doubt a Social Security calculator is going to do much for the vast majority of people who take their benefits before turning 66 except dump a heap of guilt on them for doing what they will really have no choice about doing.  And that’s filing for Social Security before they turn 66.

Yet, almost unbelievably, there is a victory for women in this sorry saga. Yes, a victory. Really.

No one deemed the housekeeper “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” as was said about Anita Hill a mere twenty years ago, when she first surfaced to accuse Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment at work. Nor was she dismissed by the powers-that-be as a deranged groupie and stalker, like Monica Lewinsky in the wake of the charges she had had an affair with President Bill Clinton, a character assassination that might well have worked but for the infamous semen-stained dress.  And no one suggested that the housekeeper had “asked for it” by simply opening a door and entering Strauss-Kahn’s room with her cleaning cart.

Instead, this relatively powerless immigrant was believed, at least until the investigators discovered there was possible reason to doubt her veracity. It the reverse of what likely would have happened a little more than a decade ago. Like all successful social change it’s more or less taken for granted, so much so that it’s left to me to point it out on this rather lowly blog. We’ve come a long way. Let’s not forget it.

Photo: Robert Young

It’s a concept foreign to most Americans. We like our good guys and our villains. How can they all be wrong? Isn’t there one person more wrong than the other? How can people attempting to do good be so ridiculously and unintentionally awful? How can there be order in the world if we are all, on some level, villains?

No, this isn’t a post about Anthony Weiner and Andrew Breibart, though it could be. Instead, it’s about the article in the New York Times asking why a substantial number of students attending New York’s most elite independent schools need so much tutoring that some of their families are spending more money on private coaches for their children than on the not-unsubstantial tuition bill itself. Exhibit A is the Riverdale Country School, a school, where one anonymous parent ‘fessed up to spending six figures on her progeny’s outside helpers, on top of the school’s $38,800 annual tab to attend. The schools claim to be deeply unhappy about the situation.

When I read through the article, I quickly came to the conclusion it was a textbook case of everyone involved being wrong.

First villain? The schools. They shouldn’t be offering up classes that a decently bright and motivated student can’t figure out a way to get a “B” in without significant outside help. Now they can either go off and admit a bunch of smarter students, or admit that maybe, just maybe, they are asking too much of a bunch of 16 year olds and re-jigger the problematic classes. They can whine and cry all they want to the New York Times about how they don’t want their students seeking outside help, but many of these schools are notorious pressure cookers, and the administrators are the ones stirring the pots. Why? That brings us to the next paragraph.

Second villain? The colleges and universities. The Ivy League, Little Ivies, Seven Sisters and the other prestigious institutions of higher education where parents spending just south of $40,000 in annual high school tuition aim to send their progeny can bleat all they want about how they are really, really seeking out well-rounded students, and not a bunch of automatons capable of getting an A in subjects ranging from English to Chemistry, while learning to play tuba, running the field hockey team, acing the SAT and, in their spare time, volunteering at the local homeless shelter but, if that were the case, they would actually be admitting the occasional non-connected decent student. But, in fact, that is not happening. “Gone are the days of a student who was excellent at math and science just getting by in English and history; now everyone is expected to be good in everything,” reporter Jenny Anderson writes. In other words if, say, Harvard began to actually do what it claims to be doing in its admissions offices, this problem would solve itself within a year or two.

Villain three? If you are reading this post, you’re probably it. I’m it, though I don’t like to think of myself as one of those people. For the dense, I’m talking about you, mom and dad. Our children aren’t perfect. They are (strangely, just like us!) going to fail things, occasionally fuck up, and otherwise not perform up to the expectations of others. The best thing we can do as parents isn’t tossing money around so we buttress our kids from ever screwing up. It is, instead, allowing them to see the world doesn’t end if you are just great in math and science but not everything else. It’s teaching them their own hard work, not the hard work of the tutor you are paying, will get them ahead in this world. It’s showing them that effort is its own reward and that a “B” is a perfectly acceptable grade. And, finally, it’s showing them that money can’t buy everything. For starters even if you have the trust fund to pay the hourly bill, you can’t bring a tutor to work.

Oh, and Anthony Weiner and Andrew Breibart? The reporters asking prurient questions? The women rushing from media appearance to media appearance to tell their tales of Facebook encounters with the Congresman? They’re all wrong.

Photo: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos

New York City Mayor for Life Mike Bloomberg, cocooned his world of Wall Street privilege, somehow never figured the golden law of snow out. And now word comes down that the city’s snow clean-up disaster might not have been as a result of simple poor planning, but a deliberate campaign of sabotage by the worker bees in the city’s sanitation department.

Well, knock me over with a fucking feather.

New York City’s garbage finest are not the most stellar of employees in the best of circumstances. As anyone who has ever lived in five boroughs knows, they have a bit of a work attitude problem. Usually this is expressed by a particular method of tossing garbage onto trucks, a way that seems to result in a certain percentage of refuse falling onto the streets. They make it seem so natural that it wasn’t till I moved to Los Angeles in my mid-20s that I discovered that, for sanitation department workers, making sure household trash bags actually landed in the back of the garbage truck without spilling open did not require anything in the way of special skills.

And for municipal employees, these are not good times. Budgets are being decimated, and, in New York City, the city’s sanitation department workers suffered layoffs and demotions last year. That’s bad enough anywhere, but New York City, budget woes not withstanding; there is one group here that has not suffered from the economy in any way proportionate with the rest of us. In fact, this group is a net winner. For those of you who live with their heads stuffed in a paper bag, that’s the folks on Wall Street, the group from whence the Mayor for Life springs, where the bonus pool is large and the living is good.

New York City is quickly turning into a city of entitled haves and have mores, the sort of people who think it’s perfectly ok for themselves to earn millions of dollars even as they demand those five figured (and that’s annual salary, not bonus) municipal employees sacrifice and sacrifice more.

It’s no surprise that an organized group figured out a way to let us know how important they really to our well being they really are even as they shoved a metaphorical middle finger in our faces. The only surprise is that it took us almost a week to realize what was going on. We are, it seems, so unused to acts of working class rage we don’t even know them when we see them any longer.

I only have one word of advice for the sanitation department. Next time, lay off the good folks of Crown Heights. They have enough problems. If you are going to stage another snow removal protest, start with East 79^th Street instead.

Photo: Beyond the Ken

Stead, the author of the wonderful Newbery Medal winning children’s novel “When You Reach Me,” chatted with the Times about for a feature about what her typical Sunday with her husband and two boys is like. It’s meant to be a look at family togetherness (We buy bagels together! We watch The Simpsons together!) but what struck me was the feeling of overwhelming loneliness that pervaded the piece. In less than 600 words, Stead either mentions or alludes to her husband’s more normal non-presence in her children’s lives twice. “My husband generally works a lot during the week, so Sunday is also our day when he’s around,” she says early in the chat, later adding that “Sunday is probably the only day when we always, always eat together.”

Stead’s not alone. Survey data demonstrates that Americans who still have jobs in 2010 are working much harder, often for less money than in the past, with productivity output per worker surging. But that comes with a painful human cost. Many of my friends who are employed in full-time jobs have, in the past year, vanished from both my life and the lives of their families. I miss them, but their families miss them more. Just yesterday, two separate mom pals told me that their husbands were never home before 8:30 at the earliest. “The children are not handling it well,” confided one (who works full-time and then some herself), while the other admitted that her husband rarely got off work before their kids were asleep. Neither felt they could complain or do much to alter the situation. They were, they both admitted, simply grateful their spouses had a steady paycheck.

So what about you? Are you or your spouse seeing less of your family, kids and friends than you did prior to the recession? If yes, how are you and your loved ones handling it?

So credit where credit it due. The wonderful George Ure makes predictions based on wave theory and a method in which he tracks word usage on the Internet. I’m not sure I really understand this, but it makes for entertaining, if depressing, reading. Well, a few weeks ago George predicted about 50 bodies would be recovered from the Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Guess how many bodies have been recovered?

As for his predictions for the rest of the year … Mercifully, his track record is not so great, at least according to this list helpfully provided by the folks at Coast to Coast AM. On the other hand, timing one’s predictions can be a tricky thing, so if we experience hyper-inflation, inner city unrest or hear from a NASA whistleblower before the end of 2009, you can credit George for letting you know the news first.

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