My Ad of the Year...

Vote in Andrew Sullivan's awards here.


Boy - I'm becoming a sentimental softy in my old age...

Maybe it's the granddaughter-effect.

The privilege...


Of being a grandfather.


Vovô from Luiz Lafayette Stockler on Vimeo.

Father's Day is coming up, BTW.

[via sullivan]

A story problem...

How long should it take two engineers with three degrees and every known power tool Dewalt has made to assemble this playset?

[More]

Answer: we have no idea.

I notice they don't mention in-laws...

As we focus on Boomers retiring and succession issues, this rather surprising finding could shed some light on some of the awkward family dynamics that cloud economic and business problems for family businesses.

The bar chart shows the percent of time people are in an unpleasant state when they are around different types of companions.
It’s probably no surprise that people find spending time with their bosses — authority figures who keep them in line — to be most unpleasant. Almost a third of the time that women spend around their bosses feels unpleasant; for men, nearly half of the time spent around supervisors is unpleasant. It’s also probably no surprise that hanging out with friends — the people we choose to spend time with — is least unpleasant.
For most of the categories, men and women report being in an unpleasant state about the same portion of the time. But the biggest divergences relate to spending time with family, and not in the way that stereotypes of feminine domestic bliss might predict: Women appear much less happy when spending time with their children and parents than men do.
This can be partly explained by the different types of activities the two genders are likely to be doing around their families.
For example, when women are spending time with their children, they are more likely to be doing chores and handling child care, which can both be relatively stressful activities. When men spend time with their children, on the other hand, they spend relatively more time watching television and traveling — more leisurely activities.
The biggest gap relates to how men and women feel when spending time with their parents. When men are around their parents, they are in an unpleasant state about 7 percent of the time. Women find being around their parents to be unpleasant 27 percent of the time.
Again, some of this can be explained by what men versus women are likely to be doing when they’re with their parents. As Nancy Folbre has written here before, women are more likely to be tasked with caring for their elderly or disabled parents than their male counterparts are.
But even if you control for these different types of activities — that is, even when both genders are engaging in the exact same labors or pastimes with their kin — there are still “sizable differences in the U-index between men and women when they are in the company of their parents or children,” the study’s authors write. [More]

One thing I have come to appreciate is how difficult it is to establish a working relationship with in-laws going both directions in generations. The stereotypical "daughter-in-law" stories from farm family advice columns could be missing the point. It may not be just the husband's parents, but parents in general that some women struggle to get along with.

Another reason women remain a mystery to me.

Grandma on the front lines...

In a fascinating coincidence, I have begun thinking about what I think will be a true squeeze on many farm operations now aggressively expanding to bring in the next generation. (There is a good reason we're all about succession at FJ, for instance.)

But I think we could be headed for a difficult margin-erosion period and that all the histrionic pestering of Congress for mandated ethanol markets will arrive too slowly in demand (if at all).  Meanwhile, production is grow briskly.

The result will be fathers and sons eating through some high-priced rents (and Aaron and I will be poster-farmers).  This is pessimistic (except for the survivors), but I think a real possibility.  Of course, not gambling on rents has its own abrupt ending as well - like not farming.

So last week on USFR I mentioned our game plan in abstract: my ideal retirement will be one expense we will cut to stay in the game.  (Nice response here) The idea of oldsters leading care-free, independent, and fully funded life is fairly new, and for much the same reasons. It was a luxury that took resources from families and generations who needed them more.

COTTON MATHER'S BIG IDEA

Old people hanging on to their worldly goods also threatened the social and economic fabric of Colonial America. Celebrated Puritan zealot Cotton Mather is generally credited with stimulating the national appetite for witch trials. But few people realize that he was among the first to try to force the elderly to retire. ''Be so wise as to disappear of your own Accord,'' he exhorted them. ''Be glad of dismission. . . . Be pleased with the Retirement which you are dismissed into.'' Nobody listened.

BISMARCK INVENTS RETIREMENT

In 1883, Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck of Germany had a problem. Marxists were threatening to take control of Europe. To help his countrymen resist their blandishments, Bismarck announced that he would pay a pension to any nonworking German over age 65. Bismarck was no dummy. Hardly anyone lived to be 65 at the time, given that penicillin would not be available for another half century. Bismarck not only co-opted the Marxists, but set the arbitrary world standard for the exact year at which old age begins and established the precedent that government should pay people for growing old. [More]

So, if we have to economize, the first to go will be stacks of cash laying around just to reassure my increasing fearful mind. Further, in order to capitalize the farm and minimize debt, I will essentially become dependent on my sons, as they run the farm.  It will be their younger and brighter minds that determine dad's allowance, as it were.

This may be more natural than we think. Consider this story from about ants:

In a fascinating turn, Wilson does the opposite in the book’s middle section, titled “The Anthill Chronicles.” Presented as Raff’s undergraduate thesis, it carries the reader down the ant-hole to describe life from the ants’ point of view. No writer could do this better, and Wilson’s passion serves him best here. His language achieves poetic transcendence when describing “the decency of ants,” whose disabled members “leave and trouble no more.” When the nest must be defended, its eldest residents — with the least long-term utility remaining to them — become the most suicidally aggressive, “obedient to a simple truth that separates our two species: Where humans send their young men to war, ants send their old ladies.” [More]

The way I look at it, Jan and I have extracted wealth from the farm as needed to live pretty well.  Indeed, we now have a lower "long-term utility". We can do our share of the scrimping in the next few years, especially if it advances the lives and possibilities of the following generations.

Makes me proud to be a grandpa...

OK, I'll admit it - Jan and I are flat out having too much fun playing in the rain here in Puerto Rico with the guests of Pioneer for me to post much.

However, this is a great dinner table story to pass along.

It's late into harvest and Grandpa (80+) is helping his his sons to finish. He leaves home for the field about 6 pm.  When the sons wrap up for the night, hours later, Grandpa is unaccounted for.  Consternation ensues.


Fields and sheds are searched.  His cell phone is called repeatedly.  The routes he might have taken are retraced several times.


Finally the sheriff is called and an official search begins.


Anxious family members call frantically back and forth as the drama plays out.


About 11 pm. Grandpa shows up at home, more than slightly surprised by the ruckus.  All is revealed.

It seems G had decided - on the spur of the moment - to attend a remedial driving course surreptitiously to avoid have a recent red-light infraction show up on his driving record and start his children wondering about his ability to drive. (During which he thoughtfully shut off his cell phone)



(It gets better.)


Who should also be sneaking into the 4 hour lecture-punishment but his own grandson who  - for remarkably similar reasons was attending the same course.

That's a bonding moment, folks.

(For once I'm not making this up.)

If you like to read to children...

Maybe this unique service will help you stay connected with your special little child when you are away:
A Story Before Bed.


We are just scratching the surface of what high-speed broadband can add to our lives.

My sons have been shopping...

The old joke about who picks out your nursing home just took a global twist.

[via free exchange]

An engineer and his sons...

To avoid doing actual productive work at the computer this afternoon, I took an old yellowing list of numbers I had created from our "measuring door jamb" in our kitchen to make the graph below for my sons.  Much to their annoyance, I would pester them to stand up straight against the white-painted woodwork and mark their height with the date.  When we redecorated the kitchen a few years ago, I had the uncharacteristic foresight to record the marks before painting over them.

This is how engineers communicate with engineer offspring.

 

[Click to embiggen]

If you look carefully...

At this picture of my granddaughter Leah in the apple orchard at the farm...

[Click to embiggen]

...you can see my house sorta over to the left, some cornstalks in the far distance gradually turning to a weedy mess, and Aaron and I not farming anywhere.

I made too many jokes about how bad last year's planting season was.

The plot is everything...

One of my favorite econobloggers is Justin Fox, who recently visited his son's 4th grade class.

Finally, one of the kids asked what my first magazine article was about. I couldn't remember, but now I've found it. And there was a question about whether I'd ever reported on any crimes. Why yes I had, I said, and told them about Sammy Joe Michael Duncan, who escaped from Bibb County Jail in Alabama in 1989 by filing away the mortar between a few bricks in the wall of his cell, knocking out the bricks, stripping naked, slathering himself with toothpaste, and squeezing through the tiny hole in the wall. He was captured a few days later hiding out in a house about two blocks from the jail. They liked that story. [More]

Heck - I like that story*.  I'm getting old enough to treasure stuff like that to tell incredulous grandchildren while driving their parents crazy.

[*I looked for more, but Google let me down]

Baby break...

Took some time today for my new sweetheart:

More to the point, we visited the new first-time parents (my son and daughter-in-law) and reassured them it would it would all be over in about twenty-five years or so.

Unless by then adolescence lasts until 35-40.

Underwear poetry...

This week on US Farm Report my commentary was about a part of my past with my father. This was the script I wrote:

As a boy, my late father had the irritating habit of being able to make me laugh just when I was busy sulking or worrying. On one occasion after a particularly poor grade school basketball game, he threw his arm around me and solemnly recited:

Johnny - 
Any man can grin when his ship has come in,
And it's all tied up at the dock.
But the man who's worthwhile
Is the man who can smile
When his underwear's tied in a knot.

Unfortunately, he repeated this ditty so many times that it remains one of my most powerful memories. So much so that this week, as I felt the panic around and within me, the words sprang unbidden to my lips - and I laughed again.


So now, in times of stress, I channel my father.   Thanks a lot, Dad.


My father could be quite silly, but maybe he was on to something. Psychologists tell us laughter is a potent tool to interrupt fear feedback loops - or panic.


So even if he was just cheering up a small boy with small problems, he was actually preparing a bigger boy for bigger problems. And maybe make me a little more worthwhile to those around me as well.


Let me rephrase my previous words:


Dad - thanks a lot!

The limerick was not original, but a lively discussion broke out with my colleagues at USFR about where it came from.  While it was quoted used in a similar form in Caddyshack, the doggerel originated with Morey Amsterdam on a 78 rpm. record circa 1950. I learned this from my original search, but I'm danged if I can find it now.

Plus we've been cutting beans all day, and I'm whacked.

Anyhoo, thank for watching, and I hope this reminds you of your father.

Boy! I didn't see this coming...

Apparently, we just maybe have been over-emphasizing self-esteem a teensy bit too much in our parenting approach.

Our child-centred society means we fret over what our kids eat, what they wear, their friends, their exam grades and their safety. A US academic has coined the term kindergarchy – a new (affluent) world order in which children rule.

“Children have gone from background to foreground in domestic life with more attention centred on them, their upbringing [and] their small accomplishments,” wrote Joseph Epstein, a recently retired lecturer at Northwestern University, in The Weekly Standard, a US magazine.

“On visits to the homes of friends with small children, one finds their toys strewn everywhere, their drawings on the refrigerator, television sets turned on to their shows. Parents seem little more than indentured servants.”

Epstein’s recollections of his own childhood evoke an utterly different world. Parents didn’t feel the need to micro-manage their children’s lives. He doesn’t remember his parents reading to him, or turning up to watch him compete at athletics. They left it to him to decide which foreign language to study at secondary school and weren’t much bothered that he was a mediocre student.

Now, he says, it’s a wonder more teachers aren’t driven out of the profession by parents bombarding them with e-mails, phone calls and requests for meetings. “Students told me what they ‘felt’ about a novel,” he recalled. “I tried, ever so gently, to tell them no one cared what they felt. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to – but did not – write, ‘Too much love in the home’.”

In Britain, too, there has been a seismic shift in parenting. “At the weekends, the kids are saying to us, ‘What are we doing today?’ – in other words, ‘You are going to entertain us, aren’t you?’ ” said Appleton, who works part-time for Netmums, an online network for mothers.

It is becoming a worldwide trend. A recent production of Snow White at a primary school in Japan featured 25 Snow Whites, no dwarfs and no wicked witch, as parents objected to one child being picked out for the title role. In Sweden a boy was prevented from handing out invitations to his birthday party at school because he was “discriminating” against the two classmates he did not invite. [More]

This is not a new development, but the degree is recognizable to many grandparents.  However, unlike many who lament the virtue of upbringing styles of yesterday, I tend to believe children, like well-built ships, will right themselves.  More importantly, they will naturally rebel against their own past and probably resurrect Dickensian childhoods for our great-great-grandchildren.

Suddenly, it is real...

I have written in Top Producer about our son Aaron coming back to the farm. It has been an interesting evolution, fraught with unexpected emotion and dramatic (to us, at least) plot twists.

Aaron has been working here since March, and good thing too. Without his labor, Jan and I would be in a huge hole. As it is we still have 300 acres of beans to plant when it dries up enough. Here in central Illinois, that isn't a bad position this year. Our corn is all up - although some took 4 weeks to make an appearance.

Meanwhile, I had planned on relatively normal schedule and had booked speaking and meeting events for ...well, this week - and much of June. So all things considered we're in better shape than we deserve.

But tonight we had Aaron and Kris and John (our grandson) for an impromptu dinner and on a whim I asked John (4) if he would like to sleep over at grandpa's tonight. The reply, "Sure!" I don't know who was more surprised - me or his parents.

So I just finished splashing and squirting the bathroom during his tubby, and Jan is inserting the little rascal into bed for (no doubt) the first time. And an occasion we had dreamed about has become real.

Like many farm parents we encouraged our children to get educations and see the "rest of the world". No problem - they couldn't get off the farm fast enough. But when Aaron and Kris began considering returning, it took some time for us to accept it as really possible.

Judging from responses I have had from other surprised farmers, unexpected boomerang offspring may be the rule - not the exception. And our happy financial situation in grain farming right now seems to offer an opportunity to make a return possible. Anyhoo, that's our aim.

But forget the crop and prices and farm program. My son, who has been gone for 15 years is home. And my grandson sleeps in his old bed.

And if you think I am being mawkish, you should see Jan.

Many of you have asked for more...

Parenting tips. Let's start with the basics for beginners:

[Slightly too much more]

Yeah, yeah - it's all my fault...

Older brothers have traditionally been blamed for all the evils in the world by their younger siblings. I just thought they were a bunch of whiners.

Turns out they are right.

More recently, Lummaa and her colleagues have been studying how sons are not just tough on their mothers but also hard on their siblings. Those born after a son were physically slighter, had smaller families and generally had a greater chance of dying from an infectious disease. The effects held up whether the elder brother died in childhood or not, suggesting that the negative outcome is not a result of some direct sibling interaction, such as competition for food, regular beatings or the practice of primogeniture, in which the eldest brother inherits everything. “Big brothers are bad for you,” Lummaa explains. “If the fifth-born was a male, then the sixth-born is doing worse.” [More]

Man, I hate it when this happens!

Older is better...

Yeah - that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

There's no news like bad news. The tabloids are full of accidents, gory murders, and mayhem, and people eat it up. But there may be a silver lining, at least for seniors. A new study finds that the human brain reacts less strongly to emotionally negative stimuli as we age, in effect making us more responsive to all things positive and less responsive to the dark and dismal. This bolsters a growing body of evidence showing that aging changes how the brain reacts to emotional stimuli. [More]

As farms across the US (and the globe, for that matter) struggle with succession issues, understanding how different-aged minds work is crucial to establishing working rules and family harmony. In fact, as we see astonishing leaps in longevity, incorporating the point of view of the older partners can offset perhaps the up-tightness too often the plague of mid-career farmers.

Another reason not to move to PHX.

[via 3Quarks]

Listen to the music...

As a father, I have struggled to comprehend the differences between my sons' views of Life and my own (the correct one, of course). Perhaps theirs is a result of heeding the words of Alan Watts.



[via DailyDish]

My family resembles glyphosate-resistant weeds...

Check out this cool map that show how your ancestors spread across the US.

Still - it reminded me of an invasive species...

[via Metafilter]