[lbo-talk] co-sleeping & sex

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Jan 3 00:49:37 PST 2006


Doug wrote:


> Ok, but what does this co-sleeping thing do to the sex life?

"If you're partnered, you're probably not surprised by the statistic that parents living with children only spend about twenty minutes each week being intimate with each other" (Cathy Winks and Anne Semans, "Moms Have Sex? Who Knew!," _Sexy Mamas: Keeping Your Sex Life Alive While Raising Kids_, <http://www.pregnancy.org/article.php? sid=1852>).

It looks like you'll have to get rich quick, so you can hire a maid and a nanny, if you are to maintain your previous level of sex life.

Carrol wrote:


> Myself, I thoroughly enjoy my adult children, preferring them now
> to their earlier selves. When Jan attended Orientation for parents
> of entering freshmen at Northern Illinois U, she found that the
> other parents split almost equally between those who were worrying
> about losing their children and those who were celebrating Freedom
> At Last!

You probably belong to the last generation of parents who enjoyed adult-centered rather than child-centered American life:

<blockquote>Contrary to the conventional wisdom, our results indicate that in the late 1990s both mothers and fathers report spending greater amounts of time in child care activities than in the “family- oriented” 1960s. For mothers, there was a 1965-75 decline in child care time and then a 1975-98 rebound in time in more routine child care and a steady increase in time doing more developmental activities. Fathers in 1998 report increased levels of participation in routine child care as well as in the more “fun” activities of helping / teaching children. The ratio of married mothers’ to married fathers’ time in child care declined in all primary child care activities, falling from 4.9 in 1965 to 1.9 in 1998. Our results suggest a behavioral change on the part of parents towards spending more time with children — behavioral change that has more than countered family change (e.g., more maternal employment, more single parenting) that might otherwise have reduced time with children.

(Liana C. Sayer, Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robinson, "Are Parents Investing Less in Children? Trends in Mothers’ and Fathers’ Time with Children," October 2003, <http://www.ccpr.ucla.edu/docs/Bianchi% 20article.pdf>)</blockquote>

According to Michael Steinberg, the trend toward more child-centered life has transformed American pop culture: <blockquote>It's not a complete takeover, but over the past thirty or forty years the image of the family has achieved a kind of normative status. This isn't the way it always was in American popular culture, and the change isn't the result of any shift in audience. Back in the thirties any city kid with a dime was likely to spend Saturday afternoon at the pictures, but in the three or four hours of an avidly-watched double feature there weren't likely to be many shots of family life, except maybe in a B picture like the Andy Hardy series.

Films were about grownups. If a household was involved it was as likely to be the heavy-drinking Nick and Nora Charles as anyone more settled. True, Nick and Nora eventually acquired a little Nicky; but Myrna Loy only really became a model of middle-class domesticity after the war, in The Best Years of Our Lives. Even the post-war medium of television was slow to catch up to the new domesticity of its audience; it was a novelty for Lucille Ball to appear as a mother.

<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/steinberg171105.html></blockquote>

It would be interesting if someone did a quantitative study.

Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list