Knowledging across life’s curriculum

Quantifacts

Reading across the web, gleaning information and surfing on various waves of information, you come across snippets of information that ring true, invite reflection, but are not necessarily connected t…

blog(re)jects

Update: A few problems with the pictures. Now they should be more stable. And change of title, shorter yet telling.

After such serious debates about objects as credible participants in conversation and the importance of an internet of things; I could not help but hear a different type of conversation from all those “things” that litter our world. Can you smell the storyline?
Here is a satirical visual take on the subject
Excerpt from Julian Bleecker’s Why Things Matter (All in good fun Julian )

Blogjects: Some Characteristics
Blogjects have some rudimentary characteristics, [...] Here are three peculiarities of Blogjects:

✦ Blogjects track and trace where they are and where they’ve been;

✦ Blogjects have self-contained (embedded) histories of their encounters and experiences

✦ Blogjects always have some form of agency — they can foment [ferment] action and participate; they have an assertive voice within the [ecological] social web.

Julian Bleecker further adds about the pigeon that blogs (a pigeon equipped with a device that retransmits flight path and polution levels):

Whereas once the pigeon was an urban varmint whose value as a participant in the larger social collective was practically nil or worse,the Pigeon that Blogs now attains first-class citizen status. Their importance quickly shifts from common nuisance and a disgusting menace, to a participant in life and death discussions.

Perhaps we should equip our disposable consumer objects with some sort of tracing device to elevate our mountains of garbage to useful status. However i think they “blog” loud and clear without. Another option would be to use objects to track and report on delinquent citizen activity!

Identifying what is worth tracing and who does the collecting is another matter all together. Isn’t this already happening?…remember big brother; so many cameras everywhere!

YES THINGS DO MATTER they tell trace stories in more ways than one!
Why aren’t we listening?

poetic morcels

I carry a notebook wherever I go and jot down what inspires in the moment. They are notebooks not moleskines! Nothing fancy. In fact the opposite of fancy is best. I like the small French made Clairefontaine notebooks. The weight of the paper is just right, not too newspaperish, nor too glossy which I detest writing on. Not too precious to be questionning what type of marks to put on the pages. Nor too flimsy to fall apart.

In these I’ve added a number of questions, half thoughts, drawings, ideas for art series, readings that inspire my musings, parts of theories, book and paper ideas; words I like, definitions I need to search for; miscellaneous thoughts of many sorts. The world is my learning space!
Two of the short inspirational sentences added lately came from 1) an author of fiction and 2) a poet. These authors were discussing aspects of their craft on BookTelevision.

One of them–heard on Imprint, was uttered by Rosemary Sullivan, a Canadian author speaking about what I believe was her newest book the Labyrinth of desire. She said :

“We need experiences to crack us open in order to become ourselves”.

In other words we need shocks and unpredictable events to be shaken out of our comfort zone to get to know who we really are and what we are capable of.

The second inspirational instance came from the words of James Dickey author and poet. The lifeguard, is a dark moving poetic story from his selected poems. The story of a man in the role of a lifeguard who fails to save a drowning boy and ends up profoundly changed by the experience. In speaking about intuition James Dickey said

“Intuition is the the celestial wireless”.

I love it.

titles and territories

Coincidence perhaps, but Danah Boyd’s posting “Can I have an ‘ist please?” echoes the musing I did with a trusted professor of mine.

To illustrate: Danah sits as a phd student in a school of information, while I sit as a phd student in a school of edtech. Danah’s knowledge efforts span people related and technology mediated affairs on the Internet. My interests are quite similar with perhaps the educational edge of learning behavior added to the mix. (It’s really more complex than what I am describing in this short paragraph).

Danah pressed with identifying herself with a title, is lost for words and asks her readers to help. The comments are hilarious:

“maybe cultural or digital phenomenologist? digital archaeologist, anthropolgist, oncologist, apologist? truthist? anti-bullshit artist?” Posted by: charles at March 7, 2006 08:46 AM

“Since your school is being renamed iSchool, waht about iAnthropologist or iSociologist?” Posted by: B at March 10, 2006 07:43 AM

“How about memeticist? Bit hard to say though.” Posted by: Kevin Marks at March 10, 2006 10:39 AM

Faced with the same dilemma, I too find this situation difficult not only as an identity exercise but one that also reflects an uneasy, unclear position within the world of knowledge, and in the geography of academia. Many of us simply don’t fit these molds anylonger.

Where is my “professional home” ? was the question I was asked. To which I answered:

++Dear ___, that is a painful question but an essential one. I can only answer with a metaphor: a fence on the academic divide of education, anthropology and sociology where the knowledge creation potential of the Internet is transforming and is transformed by new technologies, new uses and new social phenomena. An interdisciplinary position, the geography of which feels like sitting at the intersecting borders of many countries who do not speak the same language.

++Musing along, I can say that I actually live (perhaps dwell) in these intersecting spaces. They never amount to a home per se, or home yet; they are prolonged transitional spaces where morcels of identity are shaped and where a new territory of thinking, perhaps a new academic discipline could emerge. I belong nowhere for the moment. I am a traveler, a gypsy, hoping not to turn into a hobo. (I’m feeling ethno-poetic today!)

Like multilingualism or even being an immigrant, you are never of one place but of many, never fully belonging to your place of origin, or a to your first spoken words; but instead a creature of the middle, of spaces in between.

++The links to education and edtech in particular are tenuous, unformed, pieces that I am rearranging into a new whole that have little to do with formalized education, but a lot to do with informal and incidental ways of sense making. The eternal question of my belonging in edtech is revisited weekly, and the answer is yes and no. Yes because it allows an exploration of technology that is people and learning centered;and no because the qualitative grounds are not imaginatively fertile (flexible) enough to plant the types of theoretical seeds I am attempting to grow. An ambiguous place to be in, but one that is not devoid of creative potential.

Cultural learning studies…  ummm! Inter(net) learning sciences? Social software sciences? Sciences, Studies or Arts? What do you think? I don’t have the answer. I wonder what Danah will harvest from the fertile crop of responses (46) she received?

Tracing Identity

My interest in identity is long standing. My foray into the world of psychotherapy and fine arts was in fact a way to delve into identities. What makes someone who he is, is a fascinating puzzle that drives a lot of my intellectual curiosity. Identity is made up of so many different pieces that overlap, shift and change according to context, circumstances, needs, geographical situatedness, academic conversation, new interest, new role, work, culture, values, beliefs, etc. Most of what we do that is of any significance has identity marking potential built into it. How much or how litte we let these etchings transpire through our public and private selves is a complex human and social mystery.

This curiosity about identity has of course taking me on a cultural journey across anthropology. The journey I seem to be returning to more and more, the landscape of which has so much to reveal. That says something about me these days. A topic for another time.
But I am confused. I came across an upcoming conference I knew nothing about yet it is hosted at my own university. I had to find it online, querying some search engine about anthropology. That tells you how much the local is completely disconnected and further how disciplines don’t talk to each other. This is a department in the same building ! Yet nothing. I guess for most Education, and Anthropology are unrelated.
The conference will be held on May 9-14 2006 at Concordia University in Montreal. CASCA 2006:

HUMAN NATURE/HUMAN IDENTITY: ANTHROPOLOGICAL REVISIONINGS is a conference on identity and rethinking what we mean by identity.

some of the topics covered are as follow:

The theme we propose would seem to connect directly, for instance, with the following areas of current anthropological concern (amongst others):
1) …the embodied nature of identity, whereby mind is part of body, and individual body part of social body, such that any conceptualization is partial, partisan and provisional. What does ‘human nature’ mean when to be human and natural (healthy, sentient or sick) are discursive notions owned by collective systems of signification?
2) …the political nature of identity, whereby positioning in and by social discourses determine the conditions of being. What weight (freight) does ‘human nature’ carry in a milieu where identity politics would deploy subaltern notions of ethnicity, religiosity, gender and indigeneity so as to classify a sovereign space beyond the purview of others?
3) …the relational nature of identity –recursive, cybernetic– whereby things are epiphenomenal upon the relations between them. On this view, human nature is that which is elicited in particular moments and places by the contingent and relative qualities of what ‘the human’ is seen to engage with.
4) …the existential nature of identity, whereby each of us individually manifests the potential of the species, and constructs world-views, life-projects and life-courses which embody the capacities for conscious creativity intrinsic in the nature of the human as such.
5) …biogenetics, nature and identity: new reproductive technologies, the genome project, genetically modified foods. What does genetic engineering tell us, as anthropologists, about current public understandings of human nature and of our own?
6) …environmentalism, nature and identity: Gaia, new-age travelling, tribalism, religiosity and dissidence. What does the global phenomenon of environmental awareness tell us about a political reconceptualisation of the relationship between humanity and nature?
7) …’neo-materialism’ or ‘neo-ecologism’ variously argue for anthropology to consider how humanity’s identity is to ‘dwell’ in nature. Methodologically one overcomes distinctions between culture and biology, human and animal, ideal and material, by a holistic appreciation of the way human nature is at once a matter of evolution, adaptation and enculturation.

Yet nothing about technological identities, virtual identities, disembodied identities in media, trace identities in technology and the like. They are missing the newer research in Media Anthropology and CyberAnthropology and identities of globalization (many links in spanish). Some interesting authors on the subject are Anne Beaulieu, Christine Hine, and a number of others. I wrote a paper (up for publication in Anthropologie et Société) on these trace identities and what we are looking for when we track behavior on the Internet.
On the other hand you have conference presentations on Identity 2.0 (by Dick Hardt), that talk about data constructed identities with much hype around managing the implications. This is linked to Attention Economics trends and ownership of ‘click logs’ that are traces of browsing behavior on various sites. I’ve written about this previously here and here the subject is only beginning to be unpacked and showing the many sides of its emerging personality. Such as Google and Yahoo logs which are now under political scrutiny and efforts to control information.
The conversation about Identity 2.0 is one of commerce, not people; of management across platforms (avoiding silos) for ease of access… for whom do you think? Jon Udell’s recent posting on “Controlling our data” concludes with this:

Controlling our data is an idea whose time has come. In different ways, Root and Sxip are exploring how to build businesses around that idea. Whatever the outcomes, we are bound to learn important lessons.

I hope our lessons won’t be regrettable ones. In the meantime there are wider social implications here. Centralized identity data….??? Serious discussions about the repercussions and ramifications this may have must first be had. And sooner than later.
I’ll say more at some other time. I need to go sit my family for some embodied tête à tête and my mother’s Sunday lamb roast! I’m licking my chops

Expanding conceptual territories

“As an anthropologist, part of the great value I see in the study of “Indigenous Psychologies” (Indigenous Psychologies the Anthropology of the Self (Language, thought, and culture)) is that they help a person get outside the “grid” of the secular, normative, middle class frames of everyday reality to see other ways of being and knowing beyond the comfort zones of everyday middle class experience.” (Panshiva)

I couldn’t find who Panshiva was for sure but he echoes the same beliefs I have about restrictive mental health views in our ‘modern’ medical world. Medical anthropologists and ethno-medicine have much to say to expand our thinking and should be standard read for medical students. Unfortunately this cross pollination is still very rare.

An eye opening book which had nothing to do with the standard read of a practicing psychotherapist was perhaps: Suzanne Kelman’s (1998) “A cultural History of Family life”. The book which I found when perusing the bargain bin when waiting for the metro a few years back, is a very interesting comparative analysis of family related themes done by a journalist. Notions of love and loss; child rearing; the place of fathers; what happy families mean; church hegemony in families; etc. are contrasted to other cultures, providing a wider conceptual territory to think from. I found that my restricted model of family expanded after this read. A positive consequence I would say.

I wonder what a cross-cultural take on education–one that is not completely contaminated by western models, would have to say about pedagogy, prioritization of contents and useful technologies? A quick google search with ethno-education as key word turned up the following. An ethno-educational approach sees empowerment and focus on indigenous knowledge in developing countries as alternatives. Unfortunately:

The development paradigm based on the Western epistemology and value system is, however, still embedded in the development world and follows ‘the prescriptions laid down for them ['underdeveloped' countries] by those already ‘developed’ (Escobar 1992a: 411).

I could not find the reverse relationship of learning from others (I did see a project in ethno-medicine and ethno-botany though). I’ve always found comparative analyses important in understanding difference. This to me is learning that humbles and opens to the knowledge of others, widening our conceptual territories to embrace other ways of doing and seeing the world. I guess I’m conceptually claustrophobic, when it comes to our western ways. I’ve always worried when too much power is concentrated in the same hands. Give me my own generator and cook top, alternatives to the restaurant and supermarket please!

Youniverses, Generation C, Twinsumers

Stopping by Jyri Zengestrom’s blog, I ended up on a Top Model’s blog and finally on Trendwatching.com… Oh my god!!!

This is a wake up call and probably what the hoopla is all about when we read about various takes on information mirroring and personalization. Andrew Keen (echoed by Nicolas Carr and others) comments:

Another word for narcissism is “personalization.” Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

Trendwatching talks about twinsumerism and collaborative filtering. A twinsumer is someone’s likes matched to a ‘twin’ product or service.  They add:

Collaborative filtering (Wikipedia’s definition: the method of making automatic predictions about the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users) has been around for a long time (in internet years, that is). Pioneering this space was Amazon.com’s recommendation software, which could tell a customer that others who had also bought Rushdie’s Midnight Children, appreciated The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, too. [...] Others have followed.

They add that Collaborative filtering is fueling what they call Nouveau Niche, and what I briefly referenced in a prior post, that is the The Long Tail :

BusinessWeek called it ‘The Vanishing Mass Market’, Wired Magazine spoke of the Lost Boys and the Long Tail. Others talk about Niche Mania, Stuck in the Middle, or Commoditization Chaos. We at TRENDWATCHING.COM dubbed it NOUVEAU NICHE: the new riches will come from servicing the new niches!

These are niches created by these micro content markets of each and everyone’s Youniverse!  I completely understand the Narcissism metaphor being used by vocal critics, but…. Trendwatcher tags yet another trend they’ve called Generation C (C stands for Content):

The GENERATION C phenomenon captures the an avalanche of consumer generated ‘content’ that is building on the Web, adding tera-peta bytes of new text, images, audio and video on an ongoing basis.

The two main drivers fuelling this trend? (1) The creative urges each consumer undeniably possesses. We’re all artists, but until now we neither had the guts nor the means to go all out. (2) The manufacturers of content-creating tools, who relentlessly push us to unleash that creativity, using — of course — their ever cheaper, ever more powerful gadgets and gizmos. Instead of asking consumers to watch, to listen, to play, to passively consume, the race is on to get them to create, to produce, and to participate.

They mention the inevitability of much ‘crap’ being created–”superior tools and no talent still equals useless content” but acknowledge that there are exciting new niche markets created exclusively by ‘non-professionals’ with talent and new tools.

Now contrary to the verdict of culture flattening by Keen and Carr (destruction for Keen) I can’t come to the same dire conclusions. Projecting from Friedman’s ‘narrowcast’ view of culture and connectivity trends, there is simply too much of the rest of the world being edited out of the picture (see various critiques of Friedman’s flat world view). Even if the above trends can’t be denied, they are fueled by consumate consumerism, more than productive content generation. Popular culture is certainly of interest to a certain extend, however there are other less flashy ‘happenings’ that need a more fine tuned focus to see them. There are also more consumers of content than producers (good and bad); more readers than reviewers and active filters; more French bloggers than American ones (writing practices that pre-date the electronic media). My point, trends are not independant of the cultural roots of their embodied and geographically situated participants and take on their color.

I believe to a certain degree in collaborative filtering as an Information management tool; as distributed sense-making; and as an informal kind of peer reviewing. Will I find these filtering others around the google corner? Perhaps yes, if my super-encounterer luck is up! Perhaps not (and probably not). In most cases I will need to rely on trusted information producers and other sources of productive filtering and creations which take time to locate. Furthermore, if the creativity of tools and bandwith are fueling more ‘production’ of content, we’ve all seen how utterly demanding in time, energy and mental bandwith maintaining online presences can be. Enough to discourage more than one after a few months of enthousiam.

To make a cultural point, the book I’ve been reading by Scollon & Scollon’s Nexus of practice provides a number of stories about vocality and technology related to indigenous people of Alaska. It seems their style of discursivity is strongly skewed towards silence and observation over public participation and ‘all out’ vocal displays on or offline. In Alaska their connectivity is very much up to date due to the military structural needs of the past. The authors quote one Alaska native saying: “I can only speak to you to the extent I know you” (p.133). Online identities complicate the matter even further when faced with virtual ’strangers’ . Direct questions, the authors tell us are understood as scolding and are responded to by reflection in silence–not writing nor response.

I suppose many other cultural characteristics could be studied to disconfirm the blanket statement of similar techno appropriation leading to a cultural flattening and the end of High Art (Keen’s elitist art) as we know it. These are Western shoes, western values, western discourses. Perhaps another form of colonialism is setting in: techno-colonialism! If not in the access to tools or pre-defined contents (though mostly English) than in the discourse that assumes this reality is a shared view and lived experience affecting all in the same way.

flat culture

When I wrote the preceeding entry it was meant as the introduction to this one. But as we develop ideas sometimes they take on a life of their own. So instead of a short introduction to how I came to piece the information together you will get the links that hold together a search I began via Collin vs blog “Talent-cide” posting.

In pursuing these links I came across a very clear debate on the pros and cons of what is called democratization of information and problems related to Web 2.0 technologies and ideologies. Andrew Keen on Web 2.0 and Nicolas Carr, The New Narcissism are perhaps the most vocal dissenters (in the ones I’ve read). Nicolas Carr agrees with Keen when he says:

“If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural ‘flattening.’” In the end we’re left with nothing more than “the flat noise of opinion - Socrates’s nightmare.”

Some invoke The Long Tail argument, where niche markets are supported versus the loud ‘noise’ of artists supported by vocal promoters. Culture has already been flattened–bulldozed under by Americanization trends.
But here again you begin wondering how the word culture is being understood. What is culture for the writers of these postings? Art, music and literature as entertainment? Traditional journalistic entries? Or are we talking about culture as the more inclusive term understood by anthropologists?

Even here authors have identified over 90+ definitions. Are we talking geographically located cultures vs interconnected interest cultures as we see online? And who’s culture are we talking about anyhow?If the access to new tools makes more content visible, a large portion of which can be ignored as ‘trash’ , then so be it.

Instead of condemming this opening that provides an avenue to more voices, some of which were hidden from view in the past than we should be looking at solutions to filter information instead of condemming the trend as opinionated noise. Tagging is being invoked as a global emergent solution (comments you can read under some of dissenters postings) but for me more popular reads won’t do it for my taste, needs and interests. As a personal information management solution fine. And perhaps by linking well known others finds too. They act as filters to information out there. But I need to know the background or general interests of this person first. A general tagging of the web won’t cut it.
Why not see how well read others can sift and point in interesting directions as a better solution than trashing the emergent ‘reorganizing’ of the information landscape.
I’ve been blog touring for less than six months now and rapidly learnt to drop some of my first readings for more substantial ones. Meanwhile I continue my linking journey by discovering what is important to the ones I like to read. We need more knowledgeable people who can act as filters, blog and web librarians who can make sense of the onslaugh of information.

As for the “flattening of culture”, with or without web 2.0 it is already happening! I think, once you move away from the ‘echo-chamber‘ and bad ‘Harlequin romances’ out there, you can hear genuine voices with something to contribute to the dialogue.

When dads want to be there

In the last few weeks colleagues of my AiT egroup and I visited a number of social issues we felt strongly about. We debated if therapists could show their political and social colors exploring the ways in which this could be done outside the therapeutic office or studio as a way of taking a stand. Depending on your theoretical allegiance restraint runs the gamut from totally prohibited (leave no trace of your humanity in view), to the rarer political engagement transparency. We settled on a digital art show that would reflect on issues colleagues come across in therapeutic work.  I will keep you posted on the developments.
The range of issues we touched on were the oil crisis and global warming; artistic displays of eating disorders (women) vs Athlete warrior art (men); the tyranny of labels; consumerism or affluenza; Americanization of non-western cultures; disempowered youth who no longer know how to care for themselves (cook, build simple tools and shelter, grow basics etc).

One that wasn’t discussed but has lately attracted my attention is the situation fathers face regarding procreation and child care and the differences for males and females. I’ve been reading Thomas Lynch (2000) “Bodies in motion and at rest: on metaphor and mortality” which is a collection of essays on living and dying. The book attracted my attention in the Concordia book store window, and seemed fitting as a response to my recent loss. I walked in and bought it.
One such essay titled ‘Wombs’ reviews the rights and responsibilities his daughters and sons are afforded by the laws that govern maternity and paternity. He says:

A pregnancy that results from bilateral consent is legally undone by unilateral choice. [...] As it stands now, paternity, once determined, means fiscal responsibility for eighteen years according to law. There is currently, for my sons, no choice in the matter. If one of them impregnates a woman and the woman chooses to have the child, she has a legal claim aginst the income of the father. He may, of course, refuse to pay, refuse his paternity, in which case he would be a “deadbeat dad”, or some other media-made word for “no good”. [...] Is it the species or the gender that reproduces? Aren’t pregnancy and parenting human issues? I know they were when my sons and daugher were “expected.” Their mother was “expecting.” And so was I. And while a woman’s body is certainly involved in her maternity, a man is involved in his paternity. [...] Is Choice good for one and all or only one and half of the population? (pp.70-71, 73).

Thomas Lynch recognizes the importance of choice and the important of preserving rights to a say for women. What he is adding to the picture is who is left out, who has lost a say in the matter. I’ve come across a blog that goes by the name Pirate Papa It is a space for dads to tell their side of the story. There are painful stories there, and some eye openers. The writing is honest but also raw and unpolished such as this entry where the father explains how wanting to be involved runs counter to the stereotype that dads want nothing to do with their children once separated.

guess as a “single” pappa your just shuffled into that knuckle dragging girlfriend beating deadbeat dad sterio type. When faced with odds favored toward the mamma in every single court case regardless of the situation I can understand why some pappa’s would feel unwanted altogather. Give’em an invoice and show’em the door.

In Quebec there is a strong men’s movement which has generated a new type of “victim discourse” in the person of the estranged father (a strong tendency in Canada–read Michael Ignatieff (2000) The Rights revolution). This is a counter-feminist movement called ‘masculinist movement”. For a brief history of the movement that originated in the US, see ARTE’s concise introduction (in french). Their fight is about social equality in matters of child and family rights.

L’apres rupture (after separation) provides assistance in child care matters to men. There are numerous international links to “dad related rights news”.

To counter the counter movement men against patriarchy are pro-feminist, recognize the social benefits men are born into and the inequalities women still face in today’s society. They are against sexism in all social matters. ARTE also documents the origins of shared child custody which according to research is linked to fathers who lobbyed for changes in the law in order to temper the economic burden of child custody paiements.

Au Québec, les sociologues observent que c’est à l’occasion du relèvement du barème des pensions alimentaires que les associations de défenses des droits des pères sont intervenues pour réclamer des modifications à la loi sur le divorce.

ARTE aired a 3 or 4 part documentary on this subject, which unfortunately I missed. I heard positive comments from various sources. The final part of this documentary interviews children stuck in this shared living arrangement and conclude with a question: who does it benefit the parents or the children? many children were saying they did not want either parent to feel unloved and so accepted to live 1 week with mom and one with dad. Child therapists are finding this state of affairs detrimental to the health of children.

[L]es tous petits arrachés à leur mère et placés dans une alternance qu’ils ne peuvent comprendre faute d’une perception suffisante du temps, développent de symptômes sévères. Insécurité, angoisses d’abandon, mènent l’enfant qui ne supporte plus l’éloignement de sa mère à demander un contact visuel permanent avec elle ; les bébés tombent dans un état dépressif avec un regard vide pendant plusieurs heures, ont des troubles du sommeil, font de l’eczéma. Ils développent finalement une agressivité à l’égard de la mère, considérée comme responsable de la séparation, pour finir par perdre confiance dans les adultes, en particulier dans le père, dont la seule vision déclenche une réaction de refus…

In Canada they link problematic child care issues with increased mental health problems and depression in men. Health Canada has this page on the joys and developmental benefits of a father’s presence with his child. A causal interpretation could reveal other links than child separation pains!
Who is on trial here? When the social fabric of a society is weaved according to 2 parent families, social supports for alternative models are not there. Everyone loses when the initial set up (family plan) breaks down. Inevitable losses are of varying degrees and depend on making arrangements that are child centered in case of breakups. I’ve known couples who separated and moved two houses down where children could come and go to the parent and location of their choice. Instead of losing they gained two families when new partners came into the picture. Why? because the parents continued to see their children as central and continued to dialogue as supportive adults in a shared project (the well being of their children).

But in my work too many children in social service care are children with absent fathers. The burden of single parenting in a world where extended families are distant or inexistant, where communities are no longer mindful of their neighbors puts too much burden on the shoulders of a single individual. Tuning out and giving up when more presence and guidance is needed can be a survival tactic for a parent who has difficulty coping with the demands of life, work and child rearing.

There is no easy solution to such a complex problem. I feel for both : fathers who are struggling with skewed laws a consequence of past histories; and mother’s who are left fending for themselves. This is a social problem, a large one. So when I read that Jeremy Price wants to take a break from his Smelley Knowledge blog to give time to his son, I say Jeremy you have your priorities straight.