bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Vocations and altar servers.

    One somewhat-controversial topic in liturgical circles is whether altar servers ought to be all boys, or boys and girls.

    Serving at the altar used to be a no-girls-allowed thing until fairly recently. (Girls still can’t serve at Masses in the extraordinary form.) Even now, bishops are permitted to restrict altar-serving to males in their own dioceses, and where bishops have permitted girls to serve in this way, pastors are permitted to restrict it to males in their own parishes.

    Unsurprisingly, some folks would rather live in a parish with children of both genders serving at the altar, and some folks would rather it be only boys. I suppose the arguments on the side of girl altar servers are pretty obvious: Rome permits it, so there is nothing inherently wrong about it; men and women are equal before the Lord, and even if men and women properly play different roles it is rather complicated to explain that to children; girls who want to serve should be able to, etc. Arguments against it have to do with the reality that the priesthood is open only to men, that vocations to the priesthood are nurtured in altar service, and that more boys serve when altar serving is restricted to boys.

    I attend a parish in which only boys are altar servers (though adult men and women both assist as extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, and sometimes assist with serving). Anecdotally, the notion that more boys serve when girls are excluded is supported here: We have upwards of a dozen servers at each ordinary Mass, and 75 is not unheard of.

    I think I prefer the boys-only tradition, as long as it is accompanied by careful catechesis, because it is more supportive of our male-only priesthood — it echoes the reasoning, and it brings more boys into close contact with the Eucharist, and it is a seed for vocations. I think the dearth of altar servers today (typically only one to three at many parishes) is an unintended consequence of opening the role to girls. (Who would have expected that fewer children would serve if twice as many became eligible?) But I don’t fault pastors and bishops for choosing to permit girls to serve, now that permission is available. Rome permits it, and that means the decision is theirs to make.

    I wonder if perhaps a more fruitful attitude would help both boys and girls who serve at the altar. Pope Benedict recently gave remarks to a pilgrimage audience of French altar servers, both boys and girls:

    Pope Benedict told the young people they were blessed to be “particularly close to Christ Jesus in the Eucharist. You have the enormous privilege of being close to the altar, close to the Lord.”

    The pope prayed that being an altar server would help the young people deepen their friendship with Christ and enthusiastically share God’s love with their friends and families.

    “And, if one day you feel called to follow the path to the priesthood or religious life, respond generously,” he told the youngsters.

     

    Luckily for you, I can read French, so I can give you the whole quote from the Vatican website. Here is my translation:

    It is with affection that I greet the dear altar servers, come from France for their national pilgrimage to Rome, as well as Monsignor Breton, the other bishops who are here and the chaperones of this important group.

    Dear young people, the service that you faithfully carry out permits you to be particularly close to Christ Jesus in the Eucharist. You have the enormous privilege to be near the altar, near the Lord. Be conscious of the importance of this service for the Church and for yourselves. Let it be for you the opportunity to grow a friendship, a personal relationship with Jesus. Don’t be afraid to transmit with enthusiasm to those around you the joy that you receive from his presence! Let your entire life be resplendent with the happiness that comes from this nearness to the Lord Jesus! And if one day you hear the call to follow him on the way of priesthood or the religious life, respond to him with generosity!

    To all of you I wish a good pilgrimage to the tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul!

    I generally accept that one of the purposes of having young boys serve at the altar was to nurture vocations to the priesthood, and that’s why I generally support the decisions of pastors to restrict altar service to males (though, as I tried to express, I am not hostile to the pastoral decision to permit girls to serve at the altar). I know there are plenty of traditionally-minded Catholics who feel similarly to me, that boys-only altar service will better serve the Church’s need for priesthood vocations.

    But Pope Benedict’s remarks make me wonder if we who feel this way haven’t perhaps lost some of our focus on vocations in general. After all, vocations to the priesthood are not more noble than other vocations to religious life (or than marriage, for that matter). Perhaps part of the lack of reverence and lack of appreciation of the importance of altar service is not really caused by the admission of girls, though perhaps that change might have triggered events that revealed more symptoms of the problem. Maybe the problem is that we aren’t looking on altar service as a place where religious vocations of all types are planted and grow.

    At least in our parish, where the connection between vocation to the priesthood and service at the altar is preached explicitly, and where the pastor has made it clear that he is deliberately reinforcing the connection by restricting altar service to boys, families willingly and joyfully encourage (or require) their sons to serve at the altar and hope that from among these boys new priests will step forward.

    But why not, in a parish where girls are permitted to serve, still try to make a connection between service at the altar and vocations to the priesthood, or to consecrated virginity, or to contemplative religious life, or to active religious life as a sister or brother? Why couldn’t it be, in such a parish, that families willingly encourage sons and daughters to serve, and express hope that from among these boys and girls that new priests, brothers, sisters, vowed lives of service to the Lord, will emerge?

    I admit that I have never really seen such a connection made explicitly, except in the parish I attend now. I have always attributed it to the boys-only policy. But maybe the real reason is something deeper than which of two permitted pastoral choices the pastor has made.

     

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    6 comments on Vocations and altar servers.

  • Postsecondary education questions: A summary sort of post, before moving on.

    (This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)

    + + +

    In this post I came to a conclusion about parents' responsibilities toward helping adult children finish their education:

     Parents have a certain minimum education and preparation that they owe their kids; if they don't manage to do it by the time the kids are adults, the kids have a right to ask for more help; but adults who are continuing to receive help from their parents to continue their education, rightly continue to be subject to their parents as they were when they were minors.

    A lot of what the Church documents go into has to do with religious development and character development, but economics is part of it too.  I think these (both from Familiaris Consortio) are the key economic features of a minimum education for a child who may marry :

    • it will enable them to "establish their family in favorable…economic conditions." (53)  
    • it  "will… acquaint [them] with correct methods for the education of children, and will assist them in gaining the basic requisites for well-ordered family life, such as stable work, sufficient financial resources, sensible administration, notions of housekeeping" (66)

    (I propose to stick, for now, with the case of a child who likely will plan to support a family.   We'll get to other vocations eventually.)

    I also wrote that (morally rather than legally speaking) a child is emancipated 

    • when he is accessing what he needs to know
    • and is doing what he needs to do
    • to fulfill the duties of his vocation,
    • and has embarked on independent life.

    We can combine these definitions of "necessary education" and "emancipation" to arrive at something like this (economically speaking) for a child who may marry:  

    Parents must teach the child, or delegate that teaching to another, so that he knows what he needs to know and can do what he needs to do to establish his family in favorable economic conditions.  That education must assist him in gaining stable work and sufficient financial resources for supporting a family.  It must also assist him in learning to run a household and acquaint him with correct methods of educating children.

    I think everyone agrees that parents owe their minor children an adequate education.  If all the adequate choices cost money, and the parents can reasonably afford it, then they might reasonably conclude they have a duty to pony up for elementary-school or high-school tuition.   

    Given that, parents might reasonably conclude that they also have a duty to contribute materially to a child's postsecondary education — if that postsecondary education will complete the "minimum" education that a child needs.  That is, if it will teach him adequate knowledge and skills to establish his family in favorable conditions, to gain stable work, to gain sufficient financial resources, to run a household, and to educate his children.

    Here's what's coming up:

      – On the theoretical side, I have a post in the works on what it means to have "adequate" skills and knowledge.  Not a list of necessary skills and knowledge, but the meaning of "adequate."

      – On the cost-benefit side, Mark is working on a guest post (okay, right now it is in the form of several spreadsheets) about the lifetime economic differences between hypothetical sibling pairs, one of whom gets a 4-year college degree, one of whom does not.  I got a preview of the data last night.  I think you'll find it very, er, educational.  

    The point of working these things out, both on the theoretical and the practical side, is not that it is foolish or wrong to choose (or to fund) a less-lucrative path if it will make you happier; the point is to make your choices (a) within the bounds of duty to your family and (b) with your eyes open to the range of consequences. 

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  • Postsecondary education questions: A tricky conundrum about parental responsibilities.

    (This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)

    + + +

     

    So Mark and I went over my last post about parents' responsibility to help finish their kids' educations, and we identified — in Catholic teachings, not in my meandering attempts to synthesize them — a tricky bit:  three things that are hard to synthesize.  

    + + +

    Here's what we have to reconcile.

    From Gaudium et Spes, par. 52:  "Children should be so educated that as adults…if they marry, they can thereby establish their family in favorable moral, social, and economic conditions" 

     From the Catechism, par. 2230:  "Parents should be careful not to exert pressure on their children … in the choice of a profession …." 

    and from the same paragraph:  "This necessary restraint does not prevent them – quite the contrary from giving their children judicious advice."

    + + +

    So tell me:  How do you "give judicious advice" and  "educate" your children so that "they can establish their family in favorable economic conditions," without "exerting pressure" in the choice of profession?  

    Clearly some people can't make certain choices and still remain able to establish a family in favorable economic conditions.  Is educating, advising, against these choices not a kind of exerting of pressure?

    Discuss.

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  • Mysterious nouns.

    Why do we say “the Annunciation” and “the Visitation?”

    Why don’t we say “the Announcement” and “the Visit?”

    I mean, look at the other Joyful Mysteries. Sure, “nativity” and “presentation” are kind of highfalutin words, but with “Presentation” there isn’t any common synonym I can think of, fand as for “nativity” I am sure I have heard people announce the third mystery as “The Birth of our Lord” without so much as a hiccup. And come on — we have never to my knowledge used a fancy word for the fifth mystery. It’s “the Finding.”

    If “Finding” is good enough, and we don’t have to say things like “the Location of Our Lord in the Temple” then why can’t the first mystery be “the Announcement” and the second “the Visit?” As far as I can tell, Mary is unique not only by virtue of her immaculate conception — she is also the only person in the history of the English language ever to “visitate” anybody.

    Yes, this is what passes for meditation in my brain sometimes. I have to roll with what works.

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  • Postsecondary education questions: Parents’ responsibilities surrounding emancipation and helping support adult children.

    (Slightly edited and expanded since first posted, but before any comments showed up.)

    (This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)

    + + +

    I've spent a few posts now gathering facts and summarizing Catholic teaching with respect to education.  In this post I'm going to try to synthesize all that into answers to the following questions:

    Do parents have an obligation to help a child finish his education, to the point that he can fulfill the duties of his vocation, after age 18?

    May they set conditions on that help?

    Do the offspring have an obligation to accept the help (and any conditions set upon it?)

    + + +

    In one recent post, I posed the question: "When is the child 'emancipated?' How do we know he is ready to be launched?"

    I wrote about practical and legal definitions of emancipation here.    In part because our legal system limits parents' control of their offspring,

    …Parents can't guarantee that their offspring (even assuming normal intelligence and physical/mental health) will acquire all the skills that an adult human being should, not even if they throw all their best efforts at the task. That's because the young person is a person, with free will, and — news flash — persons with free will sometimes decide not to cooperate, or come up with their own lists of "necessary skills." So even if there comes no point when a parent can say , "You are done, I did my job" — there must eventually be a point when a parent can rightfully say "I am done — I did the best I could, and now it's your turn to finish your growing and education on your own — if you choose to."

    I further noted that morally speaking (as opposed to legally), a child is truly emancipated

    • when he is accessing what he needs to know
    • and is doing what he needs to do
    • to fulfill the duties of his vocation,
    • and has embarked on independent life.

    (Remember that definition, because we are going to come back and unpack it.)

    If a child is emancipated when he is doing this, then the pre-emancipation education properly includes all the preparation: learning what he needs to know to fulfill his duties (so he can access it when he needs to know it), and acquiring the skills he needs to have to fulfill his duties (so he can call on those skills when he needs to do them).

    The final step to emancipation is independent living. Even if a person has the knowledge and skills to fulfill his vocation, he isn't technically emancipated if he is still living with significant material support from parents.

    (Note that "prepared to fulfill the duties of his vocation" doesn't mean "qualified for the exact sort of job he wants" or "makes as much money as he wants." See here for my post on "what is the vocation for which education prepares us?"  We are not — yet — talking here about whether parents have a duty to help their child get a graduate degree, or whether they have a duty to pay for an expensive private college…. we are talking about a "complete enough" education.)

    As I noted here:

    "Children should be so educated that as adults they can follow their vocation… with a mature sense of responsibility and can choose their state of life; if they marry, they can thereby establish their family in favorable moral, social, and economic conditions" [GS52] "The family must educate the children for life in such a way that each one may fully perform his or her role according to the vocation received from God" [FC53].

    This kind of education is part of parents' responsibility:

    Parental authority is "unrenounceable" and should be "exercise[d]… as a ministry…, a service aimed at helping [children] acquire a truly responsible freedom" [FC21]. The primary way that parents express respect and affection for their children is in the care and attention devoted to their upbringing and in providing for physical and spiritual needs; later, in educating them in the right use of reason and the right use of freedom [CCC2228].

    I believe this implies that parents have a positive obligation, as far as they are able, to employ parental authority to help their child learn what he needs to know to fulfill the duties of his vocation; and help their child acquire the skills that he needs to acquire to fill the duties of his vocation.

    Once a child attains legal majority, it is not possible for parents to force their child to submit to parental authority for education. But legal majority is arbitrary with respect to the determination of emancipation. So what if, at that point, the grown offspring is still not adequately prepared to fulfill the duties of his vocation or to live independently?

    Let's consider two possibilities, and I will try to flesh out my personal conclusions:

    1. The offspring requests help. If at the age of majority the offspring's education is inadequate, and the offspring requests additional help from parents (whose responsibility it is to prepare the child to fulfill the duties of his vocation), I think the parents are bound to continue offering help, insofar as they are reasonably able. In return, I judge that the offspring still owes filial obedience to parents, since he isn't emancipated and is still dependent on them.

    In other words, the parents are perfectly free to set conditions on the assistance that they offer, as long as they remain within the moral constraints imposed by the responsibilities of parents toward their offspring. They also have a responsibility to offer help that is aimed at being, um, helpful. (If it's really no good, the legally-adult offspring is free to reject it, after all.)

    2. The offspring declines help. If after the age of majority the offspring declines to accept the help that parents can offer towards preparing him to fulfill his vocation, then parents are no longer "able" to employ parental authority to continue educating him. In my opinion, that is when It's time for the parent to say, "I am done, I did what I could while I had the chance to do it."

    +++

    Bear in mind that a grown son or daughter might well reject help at first, but come back later and ask for help then. I think that if the son or daughter is still not adequately prepared to fulfill the duties of his/her vocation, the parents still do have a responsibility to help prepare their child, insofar as they are able to help.

     

    You could think of this argument as going like this: parents have a certain minimum education and preparation that they owe their kids; if they don't manage to do it by the time the kids are adults, the kids have a right to ask for more help; but adults who are continuing to receive help from their parents to continue their education, rightly continue to be subject to their parents as they were when they were minors (and parents owe them the same kinds of considerations as they did back then, such as love, a good example, and the freedom to choose their vocation and profession and a spouse without coercion.)

    +++

    Two more notes:

    Obviously there is a fine line to walk between illegitimate coercion, and legitimate use of parental authority to guide the child's education and preparation, e.g., to set conditions on the help offered. There are no clear rules here. It is going to be a judgment call that requires self-examination on everybody's part.

    And a child asking for help to finish an inadequate education is a distinctly different situation from a child who has already been emancipated but who has fallen on hard times and asks for material help from parents. The parents have already fulfilled their duty to educate the child. I am not going to consider this situation any further right now, but will restrict myself to conditions surrounding emancipation for the "first" time.

    In the next post I am going to consider what it means to "have the necessary knowledge and skills." Not so much a list of which knowledge and skills are necessary… as what it means to "have" knowledge and skills at all…

    …and hang in there for a promised guest post from my husband on economics.

     

    +++

    UPDATE.  I want to make it clear that this post does not reflect Catholic teaching.  This is me trying to figure out the implications of the teachings that I summarized earlier in this series, so that I can move forward and feel reasonably confident that I'm not way off base.   

    Anyone come to any different conclusions?

     

    SECOND UPDATE:  I think about this topic some more here.

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  • Frugal wardrobe-building advice.

    I am no fashion blogger, but! Great advice here at Squawkfox entitled “Frugal fashion: 12 classic pieces every gal should own.”

    I do know something about this because after my weight loss necessitated a complete wardrobe overhaul, I tried very hard to plan my purchases for maximum utility.

    Of the 12 classic pieces that Squawkfox identifies, I am proud to say that I deliberately acquired 9 of them as part of my wardrobe overhaul, with a few modifications (my classic trench is black, not beige). I am also pleased as punch that this “budget” site has the same taste in designer shoes as me — I own a pair of black heels exactly the same as hers, from the same designer, except that mine are peep toe. And I bought mine used on eBay, sweet!

     

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  • Post-secondary education questions: “Ignore your parents,” aka anecdotal evidence that we’re not aware how much things have changed.

    (This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)

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    Have you ever read the Ask A Manager blog? I really love it, and I am not sure why, because I do not have a job anymore, let alone a manager, and so I do not technically need any of her advice about coworkers and harassment and crazy bosses and the like.

    I think one of the reasons I like AAM is because she dispenses no-nonsense advice about getting along with people, advocating for yourself without stepping on others' toes, and dealing with the way things are instead of how you wish they would be. These are good skills in any setting, not just an office.

    But the more I read it, the more I think it is helping me keep in touch with the outside world just a little bit, hopefully enough that I can use some of that information to help prepare my kids for it.

    Anyway, apropos of the recent post in which I argued that one of our problems is that older people are giving advice that would have been good a generation ago and isn't good now, we have this reader question at AAM, from a reader fresh out of college who has secured a $10/hr school administration job she's excited about:

    My mother is not happy with me taking this job whatsoever. She thinks that since I double-majored in four years from college, I should be able to find a job that starts me out at $18/hour. I understand that she just wants the best for me, but honestly I think she is in denial about how bad the job market is at the moment for recent college graduates (especially since both of my majors are in the humanities). She thinks that just because I graduated college, I should be able to find a prestigious job. But I have looked on multiple job sites and sadly $10/hour is on the higher end of the pay scale around where I live when it comes to entry level work. I am lucky that I found a job in general that is full-time, especially since so many of my friends that live around here cannot even find that.

    My mother complains that the pay at this new job is too low and that they are trying to screw me over …. but my new employer has been informing me on what has been going on … every step of the way and has been very good with answering my questions and concerns in a prompt manner. My mother says that I will be “working for a bunch of monkeys” and that I lost too much money since I received the job offer in mid-July and will not start until the third week of August. But isn’t it normal to wait that long to start a new job, especially since it is for a school?

    …[S]o many of my friends are getting ripped apart by their parents for the fact that they cannot find a well-paying job out of college. I think it would be beneficial if you can address the fact that the economy is still pretty bad for recent college graduates since many of our parents have not looked for a new job in many years and do not see it first-hand.

    The blogger writes, a bit tongue in cheek,

    As of right now, all parents are prohibited from giving job search advice to their children. All of them. Yes, the sensible few will be punished for the transgressions of their peers, but that is the price that must be paid to put a stop to this epidemic of awful advice.

    Your mom is wrong. Your friends’ parents are wrong….

    Ignore her. Ignore anyone who seems not to be aware of the terrible job market that entire country is dealing with.

     

    more

    Not too long ago, in my post about what children owe their parents, I pointed out that the Catechism says that grown children should "willingly seek [their parents'] advice" and "accept their just admonitions." It is probably worth pointing out that the Catechism does not say that grown children should necessarily take their parents' advice, nor that they should accept admonitions that aren't just. One of the ways we show the unconditional part of the respect owed our parents is by asking for their advice, but it isn't inherently disrespectful to reject that advice (charitably, perhaps without comment) if it is truly bad advice.

    And while we're at it, remember that in the post about what parents owe their children, I pointed out that parents ought to offer "judicious" advice to their grown offspring. If the only advice you have to give is injudicious, maybe you have a parental duty to keep it to yourself!

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  • Postsecondary education questions: Are we aware how much the costs have changed in the last 20 years?

    (This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)

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    At the same time that I linked here to the "can you still work your way through college?" calculator, I shared the link on FB.  

    One of my FB friends took away from that, mainly, a message that "bootstraps are not enough," that "success is connected to privilege," and that "it's tempting to think that one's own luck or privilege is connected somehow to your work ethic."  A discussion followed.

    I don't disagree with that message entirely, except to note that a really lousy work ethic or willful foolishness can cause you to throw away the benefits you got from your privilege and luck.  The two are connected somehow.  But the point stands that it's a tenuous link.

    But what I find interesting from the calculator is not so much the state of things today as the change over time.  It's so steep in the last 20 years or so that I fear a lot of people don't realize how much the game has changed; their head is stuck in the economic situation back when they went to school, or if they are older, maybe back when their kids went to school.  They still think that (barring serious obstacles) if you can't pay for a four-year public school, it must be because you are not willing to work your way through.  

    In other words, bootstraps used to be enough for, if not everyone, then for a lot of ordinary people.  And now they're not.  And a lot of former bootstrappers haven't got the memo.

    + + +

    Disclosure here is that I did not have to do the bootstrap thing.  I had a full academic scholarship, and my graduate degree was fully funded by research assistantships and a fellowship.  

    When I started at Ohio State in 1992, if my memory is correct, it cost approximately $10,000 per year for tuition and room and board.

    With inflation, that amount in 2012 would be approximately $16,000 per year.

    Today that cost is $20,429, an approximate increase of 25% over  inflation.  It's like having to pay for five years instead of four.  This is a pretty big jump, especially considering that wages are low and jobs are scarce right now.

    I have an even steeper jump in expectations because I live in Minnesota now, where the comparable cost at the University of Minnesota is $21,500.  (Residents of some states have it better:  the University of Iowa cost is $17,220 and the sticker price at Iowa State is $15,447.)

    (Hey, friends in Iowa, how would you like a live-in houseboy in five years or so?  Let's talk.)

    I bring this up not to complain about the absolute cost of post-secondary education, particularly four-year public colleges, but to point out that it may explain why so many otherwise smart people appear not to have grasped the situation:  Parents are encouraging and enabling young people to take out mountains of debt, often for degrees that will not generate enough income to pay the debt off for years and years.

    This is happening in part, I believe, because they remember that when they were looking at college, it was a foregone conclusion that college, any sort of college, was a good investment.   If you paid more up front, it seemed reasonable to assume that you might reap more rewards, either in higher income or in prestige and connections.  If you didn't care so much for prestige and connections, you could still get a solid-enough four-year degree — sometimes a truly excellent one — at numerous less-expensive schools, where it was still theoretically possible to cobble together enough money from jobs, small scholarships, and manageable loans to pay for the whole thing.

    Obviously many young people, even then, faced hardships that made "working their way through" a four-year degree impossible.  There has always been a privilege gap.  But I submit that there's a really big population of young people today whose parents lived with the expectation that it was possible, but who don't live in that possibility now.  And their parents maybe haven't gotten the memo. 

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  • Postsecondary education questions: Can you still work your way through college?

    (This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)

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    More fact-gathering.  Just this past spring, PBS Newshour's blog The Rundown posted a useful article:

    In researching the growing amount of college loan debt that students are taking on as academic sticker prices steadily increase, we wondered: Is it possible to pay for college through summer and part-time jobs alone?

    So we compiled data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Center for Education Statistics and others to create a calculator that compares possible annual income vs. college expenses since 1976, the first year all the data we need is available.

    You can plug in your own hourly income as well as hours worked over the school year and during summer, and whether you attend a private or public college for a two-year or four-year program. Or, you can use our assumptions of the federal minimum wage rate — currently $7.25 an hour — with a part time job of 20 hours per week during the school year and a full-time job of 40 hours per week over the summer. Mousing over the lines shows you the college costs for that year and earnings. The difference shows whether you've made enough money or if you need more to foot the bill.

    The calculator is located here.

    Looking at four-year public institutions and using our assumptions for hours worked and income, average college costs actually could have been paid for up until the 2000-2001 school year. After that, a student would have to work more hours, or make more per hour, to keep up.

    I think they must have changed the calculations since they wrote the article, because when I put "minimum wage," "four-year" and "public" into the calculator, I see the lines cross in 1991-92 — my senior year in high school.  

    (Having played with the numbers, I suspect they erred and got the "could have been paid for up to 2000-2001" for the case of "working 40 hours a week all year long while attending school full time.")

    It is extremely instructive to look at the average costs of two-year public colleges.  In 2012, you can just about break even working a minimum-wage job for only 15 hours a week during the school year, and 40 hours a week during the summer.  

    If you are attending a four-year college, you can just about break even working the same amount of hours if you could get your hourly wage up to $13.50.  Perhaps this is a good argument for doing some time in a vocational or trade school before starting college — anything to bump your earnings significantly above minimum wage.

    There's always the work a little, study a little option.  What if you worked minimum wage, 40 h/week for a year (saving ALL your money), then attended school with room and board for a school year, for eight years in a row, working all the summers?  I calculate that if you'd done that for the past eight years, you'd actually have come out ahead by $9500 to put toward your other expenses.  

    Those two-year colleges are looking like a better and better idea.

    Spend some time with the calculator and tell me what you've learned.

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  • Intersections.

    Minnesota Mom has a post with a couple of anecdotes, including this one:

     I was on my way to confession (not surprisingly) and Mass at the Cathedral, and at one of the stoplights there was a man with a sign.

    There are often people at this particular intersection. Usually, we drive right past because my husband would rather give the money to charity. “I don’t want to fund their habit,” he says, and he’s right. Most of these people want a few bucks for cheap booze…but we don’t really know and when you’re stopped right there…

    I just felt guilty and awkward for not acknowledging him. 

    I took a dollar bill from my purse and rolled down the window. The man hoisted himself to his feet—he had a cane—and proceeded to stagger over. He was really, really staggering and I thought, “Oh great. He is drunk and I’m an enabler.” 

    Then he fell on the grass and tried to get back up. 

    He fell again. He couldn’t do it. 

    “Just…just give it to me!” he muttered, embarrassed, but I really couldn’t reach him and felt awful—just awful. The light turned green and there was a line behind me. I opened the door. I grasped his hand and pulled him up. 

    As I got back in the car and drove away—my heart nearly exploding in my chest—I thought two things. One, I thought about how soft that poor man’s hand had been, and how tightly he grasped mine when I extended it. 

    Click over to read the rest if you like.

    Is there anyone in the city who doesn't have an encounter like this once in a while, with the guilty looking-away?  I don't have all the answers, and I don't always live up to my convictions (read:  I pretty often don't.)

    But some time ago I found some of the answers in Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI's first encyclical which was released on Christmas Day in 2005 (and which I didn't get around to reading until a year and a half later).

    Reading it gave me the conviction that even if you are certain it's better not to give handouts to beggars, the one thing we may not do is refuse to acknowledge them.

    Look people in the eye. Smile or nod. If you're not behind a car window, say "Hi" or "Good morning," the way you would to any stranger you pass on the sidewalk.

    That can be really hard to do when you've already decided you aren't going to give him or her any money or food, or if your pockets are empty, but pretending a person isn't there is simply not an option for the Christian.

    If you feel ashamed to look someone in the eye and not to give him what he asks, I guess you're just going to have to feel ashamed, possibly right along with the man or woman who has the sign.  

    It won't kill you.  

    These are the words of Matthew 5:42, which comes after the Beatitudes, between the teachings on retaliation and the teachings on loving your enemies:

    Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on the one who wants to borrow.

    It doesn't say "Give anyone who asks of you exactly what they are asking for," and it doesn't say "Lend to everyone who wants to borrow." It says "Give" and it says "Do not turn your back."  

    It doesn't tell you exactly what to give, but one would think that giving nothing at all, not even a kind look, has been definitively ruled out.  One would think turning away, so as not to have to see the cardboard sign, to be out of the question.

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    (I wrote about this at greater length back in 2007 when I had just finished reading Deus Caritas Est.  Here's that post, which includes quotes from the document to support my discussion.)

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  • Post-secondary education: For the sake of completeness, filial responsibility laws.

    (This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)

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    I've been blogging about how, legally speaking, parents' compulsory obligation to support their children ends at age 18, but how there's at least some evidence of a social expectation that parents will continue providing material support at least for a while.

    For the sake of completeness and symmetry, I ought to point out that some states have on the books a "filial responsibility law" which compels adult children to provide material support to indigent parents.

    There's a little bit about this here 

    Filial responsibility laws typically don't apply unless your parent has to accept financial support from the government or she incurs a nursing home or other medical bill that she has no possibility of paying. If she has no financial resources, you might be expected to pay for her care. The nursing home, hospital, government or a third party can file a lawsuit against you in states that allow it, seeking a judgment that would obligate you to pay your parent's bill.

    The law gives courts some discretion when enforcing filial responsibility laws. If you're barely making ends meet financially, courts typically won't require you to impoverish yourself to pay for your parent's care. Likewise, if you're paying significant costs for your own child, such as college tuition, this may exempt you from being responsible for your parent as well.

    … If your parent abused you or abandoned you as a child, the law allows that she's undeserving of your financial support. However, some states have statutory requirements for abandonment. In Pennsylvania, your parent must have abandoned you for at least 10 years before you reached age 18.

    My state, Minnesota, repealed its filial responsibility law in 1974.  But filial responsibility laws remain on the books in many states: 

     In a 2002 article titled, “Filial Responsibility: Can the Legal Duty to Support Our Parents Be Effectively Enforced?” by Shannon Frank Edelstone, appearing in the Fall 2002 issue of the American Bar Association’s Family Law Quarterly, the author listed thirty states that had filial responsibility laws on the books. 

    Those states were Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia. 

    While each state’s laws vary, most provide that children have a duty to provide necessities for parents who cannot do so for themselves.

    A recent Wall Street Journal article explored the question of being "on the hook for Mom's bills," describing a case where an adult son in Pennsylvania was ruled to owe more than $90,000 for his 65-year-old mother's hospital and nursing care bills after a car accident:

    The … family's experience serves as a warning for middle-aged children with parents who are racking up long-term-care bills. In many states, including Pennsylvania, the filial-support law doesn't require lack of cooperation or asset shielding on the children's part. They simply have to be deemed by a judge to have the means to pay the bill, Ms. Pearson says.

    The best defense against such laws, elder-law experts say, is planning. "If your parents aren't multimillionaires, then you need to get some advice way early, maybe when they're 65," says Carolyn Rosenblatt, a San Francisco mediator, elder-law attorney and registered nurse. "By the time they're in their 80s, most people need some help. How would you pay for that?"

    Among the possible strategies: buying long-term-care insurance before health problems begin or building an in-law unit that you could rent out, perhaps to a child in college or starting a first job, until your parents need it.

    I'm not really sure whether it is relevant to the discussion.  But this is, I think, perhaps the flip side of considering whether parents should allow their adult children to live at home.

     

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  • I’m telling you, food waste — not eating local — is the future of eco-cooking.

    A brief bit on NPR about harnessing some of the good stuff out of the food waste stream:

    About 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten. The average American consumer wastes 10 times as much food as someone in Southeast Asia — up 50 percent from Americans in the 1970s. Yet, 1 in 6 Americans doesn't have enough to eat, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And food waste costs us about $165 billion a year and sucks up 25 percent of our freshwater supply.

    That's all according to the report with the not-so-subtle title, "Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill," just released by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

    I really have to read that whole report, because this is one of my pet peeves:  all the exhortation to eat local to reduce your carbon footprint, when household and restaurant food waste slips by silently, all that energy and water that went into production, processing, packaging, and transportation gone just like that.

    Maybe I'll get to it after I finish with all the post-secondary education series.  In the meantime, consider putting your family on the Squawkfox Food Waste Challenge.

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