Too Safe for Children?

September 16, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

“The city went about its business, and in many ways the place was heady and wide open in ways that just aren’t possible now.”

The New York Times devotes its entire City section to the idea of being seventeen in the city. This sentence is from a nostaligic piece on being seventeen in 1980. The author, Christopher Sorrentino, has the uneasy sense that kids today are more sheltered. “Apron strings were untied a lot younger then,” he says. “Parents didn’t hover so much,” says the Times blurb.

Sorrentino adds, “I should confess that I can’t imagine making a similar arrangement with my own kids . . . Are you kidding? The kid’s going to be 12, and my heart’s in my mouth if I send her out for a quart of milk.”

This dilemma isn’t confined to New York, this nagging thought that in giving kids more safety we've also deprived them of something important. Alongside all the news stories about the dangers of toys and priests and candy and everything else, there has been a small but noticeable backlash. Sorrentino’s article is part of this ambivalence – the sense that protection is becoming overprotection. The Dangerous Book for Boys has been a best seller, largely because its title and publicity promise a more rugged, less cautious ideal of childhood. Elsewhere, Jeff Zaslow in a Wall Street Journal article – linked to by a couple of sociology bloggers (Ezster, Anomie) – complains that the concern about child sexual abuse has poisoned the atmosphere. Children are taught to fear men, and men are afraid to go near children other than their own. Last Halloween, I contrasted today’s trick-or-treating with that of my youth, when kids would range far from home unaccompanied by parents.

Apparently, it’s not just in the US that childhood has become more circumscribed.. The London Daily Mail posted a map showing the roaming area of children over four generations in the same family in roughly the same part of Sheffield. Back in 1919, Great-grandfather at age eight had a range of six miles. Today, the eight-year-old in the family is allowed to walk 1/6 mile – to the end of the street.

Ready, Aim . . .

September 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

I should really have passed this one off to Dan Myers, who is developing urinal blogging into something of an art form or at least he was until he ascended into the lofty area of peace studies. Or maybe I should have passed it to Chris Uggen, who has blogged about the American tendency to deal with problems by criminalizing them. But I’ll do the reporting myself, even though the story is old news. I discovered it only recently on, of all places, a food blog.

Ten years ago, the powers that be at JFK airport signed a Dutch company, Schiphol, to run the International Arrivals Building, probably because the Amsterdam airport, run by Schiphol, is one of the world’s finest. JFK was one of the worst.

In Amsterdam, they had a clever solution to a men’s room problem. No, not the Larry Craig kind of problem; the Dutch are very open-minded about sex. The Dutch are also very clean. And the problem was that jet lagged travelers, men at least, tended to be, how shall we put it, careless? aimless?

I imagined what the American solution might be. Signs posted on the walls: “No Spillage or Spraying. Penalty $500 fine.” But where Americans tend to frame problems in moral terms, the Dutch have a more practical approach, focused on solving a problem rather than on punishing evil. At the Amsterdam airport that meant improving aim by providing a target.

If you go to the men’s room in the Amsterdam airport, you’ll see a fly in the urinal.


If you’d look closely, which you probably wouldn’t, you’d see that it wasn’t a real fly but a trompe l’oeil black outline. The idea was that men would aim for the fly - the stream would go from one fly to another (I’m sure this pun doesn’t work in Dutch) – and the men’s room would stay cleaner.

It worked. A study by Schilpol’s social science team found that fly urinals had an 80% reduction in spillage.

Road Rage

September 11, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Over at Blue Monster, Dan Myers is trying to rein in his road rage. Now that he’s doing a course in peace*, he’s trying to practice what he teaches. Dan, if we believe his self-report, is apparently the kind of driver who not only drives fast but curses out the other drivers on the road whose driving isn’t up to his standards.

He’s not the only one. I’ve ridden with people who on foot were eminently reasonable and polite but on the road became ogres. What is it about driving that makes us forget ourselves? My friend Gail, for example, forgot she had her young nieces in the car with her and slipped into her usual driver monologue, a running dramatic commentary on the inadequacies of other drivers. “Oh Auntie, you said the A-word,” came the voice from the back seat. The A-word and probably worse. But why?

Goffman has the answer. Because we’re locked in our steel-and-glass isolation tanks, we can’t engage in the little interaction rituals that validate and uphold the self of each person in the situation. When we can’t perform those rituals of repair, things can spiral further towards anger. Neither driver can hear the other, so we think we’re invulnerable to any reaction from the other guy. That may account for this anecdote told me by a state trooper (also an adjunct professor in sociology at the time): In one of these highway ego-contests – dangerous enough when you’re going 70 mph – one of the disputants pulled alongside the other and brandished a pistol. In his anger and isolation, he’d forgotten that the other driver might have a cell phone and that he might use it to call the troopers.

My son has the solution. The next generation of cars should come equipped with a menu of messages that you can flash on your rear window. With the touch of a button, you can say, “Sorry for cutting you off there. Won’t happen again.” Or “My mistake, I should have signaled earlier.” And so on.
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* I highly recommend the student entries in the Peace Blog for the course.

Hey, Larry Summers - Read These

September 7, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why do men’s shirts have the buttons on the left side, but women’s blouses have the buttons the right? Someone posted this question at the Teaching Sociology listserv/GoogleGroup. Robert H. Frank’s poses this same question in his book The Economic Naturalist, and I blogged about it not long ago. I thought again of converting Frank’s economics assignment into a sociological one: find something curious or paradoxical in everyday life, something you’ve seen with your own eyes. Todd Bern at Broward Community College calls this assignment “The Inner Sociologist,” and requires students to peg their questions to the topics in the readings for the current segment of the course.

I haven’t assigned this yet. But in keeping with my principle of not asking students to do something I hadn’t done first, I tried coming up with some questions. Turns out, it’s not all that easy. But here are a few.

Why do college/university courses meet two or only one time a week but high school courses meet five days a week?

Why do baseball players throw the ball around the infield after they make an out?

Then I went to the newsstand this morning, and this is what I saw.


Men’s magazine covers have pictures of attractive women, but women’s magazine covers have pictures of . . . attractive women. Why not attractive men?

And what’s with the numbers? (Larry Summers, BTW, is the former president of Harvard. He was forced out for several reasons, but one of those was a talk he gave suggesting that compared with men, women were by nature less inclined towards math.)


Cosmo is the piker here with only 4 and 5. Glamour raises with 12, 39, and 101. Vogue outbids them with 840, but Lucky comes in with 863 and looks like it’s going to win.


But then Bazaar leaves them all in the dust with a bid of 1,015 New Looks. Beat that.

But why? You don’t see numbers like these on other kinds of magazines.