Article Analysis: Digitalk and Parental Happiness

The first article is “Digitalk: A New Literacy for a Digital Generation” by Kristen Hawley Turner.  The digitalk that of the article title refers to a type of communication that many teens use in instant messaging on cellphones.  This form of communication uses a type of shorthand that is useful in to the format.  But it also employs many clever tricks and turns of written language that the author finds rather clever.  She disagrees with those who feel that digitalk is a kind of degrading of the use of language or that it indicates that the teens who use it are incapable of expressing themselves intelligently.  Indeed after some study Turner argues that digitalk has its own rules and that it's something that its users clearly understand.  After asking her students to write an essay using digitalk she demonstrates that entire conversations can be conducted using it. 

The main theme of the article is how to find new methods to teach particularly at-risk young teens how to write standard English.  The author makes it clear that the types of teens she is trying to reach are the ones that have difficulty expressing themselves using established forms of written communication in the classroom.  The use of digitalk is a means to use forms of communication familiar to the students as a way to introduce them to the proper use of language in its standardized form.  Therefore the author hopes that she encourages her most learning challenged students to develop a better familiarity and mastery of standardized forms of language.  They can do so by becoming adept at translating back and forth between digitalk and standardized US English.  There is a lot of similarity here to the use of what is called African American English Vernacular (AAEV), also more derisively referred to as Ebonics, back in the late 1990s.  Similar to digitalk AAEV was used by teachers in certain inner-city school districts in California to teach the basics of reading and writing to students from particularly at-risk communities as a part of a high-school dropout prevention program.

It would have been more helpful had Turner cited some examples of the efficacy of such interventions. Much of the evidence she presents for the use of this method is anecdotal.  A more comprehensive approach to the use of such teaching methods, such as AAEV for instance, might help convince detractors that using the language of students from at-risk communities to communicate and teach them is sometimes the best way to reach them.

The second article to be reviewed is “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting” by Jennifer Senior.  Senior's article discusses the inherent conflict between parenting and happiness.  The author reports that a large body of research stretching back decades has reported that for most marriages, happiness declines precipitously after a couple has had two or more children.  This appears to be a major contradiction of a long held culturally established assumption that children bring happiness.   Senior sets out to explain how many parents can report being so happy after having a child, when the preponderance of evidence from social science research is that the reverse is true.  The conclusion she comes to is that children bring joy and even fulfillment to parents, but they don't bring happiness and that parents may conflate the two. In fact, children introduce conflict into relationships.  Parents who usually have different ideas on how to raise a child will clash over child-rearing differences.   Children also make enjoying the simple pleasures in life, no matter how little the reward (such as watching television or visiting with friends), very difficult to enjoy.  Senior reports research that people were asked to list those activities they felt were both pleasurable and the majority of respondents selected "volunteering first, prayer second, and time with children third."  

She finds the crux of the problem in a large-scale cultural shift that followed the transformation of US culture from an agricultural society to an industrial one.  In the pre-industrial era, children were a source of labor to help out with tasks on the farm or with a small business.  They were seen as assets to the parental household.  In the industrial and especially post-industrial era, raising children in America is seen as an expense that contributes little of value in return. As child-rearing can often be a burden at particular ages (from ages 1 to 6 and again from ages 12 to 18), they can often be a major fountain of stress that parents see little reward from.  

A telling example was provided in a study of parental happiness in Scandinavian countries.  Senior reports rather compelling research that countries with generous social welfare and parental leave policies like in Denmark or Sweden, greatly reduce the emotional burdens placed on parents through providing for health care and child care.  Parents in these countries are reportedly more happy as result than in many other industrialized countries.  

The only critique of the essay is its exclusive use of heterosexual couples.  Senior should also have examined the evidence that same-sex couples are reportedly better at parenting. This is likely due to the more generous sharing of what would be considered strict gender roles in heterosexual households. This would have provided another reason heterosexual couples are not reporting much familial happiness.

References

Freiberg, Karen. (2013). Annual Editions: Human Development 13/14, 4th Edition. South University. Web. 06 July 2013 http://digitalbookshelf.southuniversity.edu/books/0073517089/id/art30_ufn01

Senior, Jennifer. (2010, July 12). All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting. New York Magazine. 

Turner, Kristen Hawley. (2010).  Digitalk: A New Literacy for a Digital Generation. Phi Delta Kappan, September 2010, pp. 41–46.