Tara’s lessons for parents and young flyers:

“HELL is someone else’s children on a long-haul flight. But don’t automatically blame the youngsters. Children who misbehave usually do so because they are allowed to by their parents. I’ve travelled extensively with my children, aged 12 and seven, and I admit that I’ve always boarded with some apprehension and a quiet prayer: “Please, let my kids behave.” And they have. I’ve taught them travel etiquette from a young age. I’ve made sure they know how to behave. I don’t want my children to bother other people and, somewhat selfishly, I don’t want them to bother me.

Travelling is my great passion and I’ve always wanted to share that with my children, not struggle through it with them. These are some of the things I’ve taught them.

No kicking. I’ve had a child kick the back of my seat continuously from Tokyo to Hong Kong and when I politely asked his parents to ask him to stop, they behaved as if I was being unreasonable. They were unreasonable and their son was a monster. Under no circumstances should your child kick the seat in front. I usually remove my children’s shoes on long-haul flights, just in case they kick accidentally.

Be prepared. Have your child carry a separate bag, with carefully chosen boredom busters inside. Keep smaller toys and games in Ziploc bags, for easy access. There’s nothing more frustrating than searching a backpack for one elusive piece of Lego.

Ensure your child always wears shoes to the toilet. You’d be surprised how many people don’t.

Don’t let your child run up and down the aisles, ever. They need to learn to be patient, and to sit in their seats. Children who run along the aisles with parents behind, smiling wearily, are irritating for all other passengers. If your child is restless, take him or her regularly to the back of the plane to stretch and play a few games. Then it’s back to the seat.

Don’t let your child stand up and peer over the seat at the passengers behind. What might appear cute to you can wear thin on others quickly.

For younger children, break the flight into sections to help pass the time: sleep time, play time, reading time, movie time, meal time, stretching time.

Encourage your child to play or read alone. You shouldn’t be expected to provide constant entertainment. A bit of effort in this department when they’re younger means you’ll have independent little travellers before you know it.

Reinforce the need to be polite, patient and quiet. Children need to know that flight attendants have other people to deal with, and they are not the only ones on the plane. If children know what is expected of them, they will most likely exceed your expectations. Kids are like that.”

Until more airlines offer childfree flights, and I have to sit next to or near parents and their kids on planes, I want to it be parents like Jane Tara and what I predict are her well-behaved kids!

What other suggestions do you have?

Gruenfeld explains this new wave as one in which women can finally “own their own power by just being women, where you don’t have to see that as totally incompatible. You can be feminine and be a totally powerful person.”  And part of that power comes from figuring out how to manage one’s professional and personal life.

Sandberg has been able to that–she manages her professional life with the raising of two children, and believes that “sharing leadership starts in the home,” with the splitting of domestic side of family life.  She has a 50-50 partnership with her husband, Dave Goldberg, CEO of Survey Monkey, and that this is key to seeing more gender equality in the workplace. Sandberg thinks it “starts with parity in the division of labor at home, “because wives who shoulder more of the burden of child care and housework than their husbands are more likely to lower their professional ambitions or drop out of the workforce altogether.”

Now parity of division of labor leading to more women in powerful business positions would mark some real change.  I like how she advises women to “choose their life partners wisely, to make sure they will be supportive of their professional careers.”

However, when Sandberg talks about how a woman should manage her career, she as a symbol of change comes up short — for me anyway. She advises women to keep striving for jobs they will love “especially before they have children.”   She also says to “keep your foot the gas pedal until the very day you need to leave to “take a break for a child.”

This kind of advice reflects the pronatalist assumption that women will at some point have a child. What would be a sign of real new wave symbol is if she gave the above advice, sure, but also and first the advice to think about whether you want to have children at all, and if you don’t want them, that’s a completely legitimate choice.

It will be sign of real change when women in powerful positions like Sandberg speak from the clear mentality that motherhood is optional, and does not have to be part of “having it all.” “All” can mean many things, not just balancing work inside and outside the home.

A woman quoted in the article says, “Thankfully, there are women like Sheryl who show I can do this while still having a very fulfilling personal life.” It will be a real sign of change when female leaders like Sandberg promote the reality that a “very fulfilling personal life” can include motherhood, but does not necessarily have to.

What powerful women do you know of who have clearly spoken to this reality? I don’t mean that they have said they are not  having children, but that they hold this belief?

• 4 million babies will be born in the U.S. in 2012
• China will add 16 million babies to their population this year
• A baby girl born in the U.S. today can expect to live to the age of 81.3–until 2093!
• A baby girl in the U.S. will grow up (on average) to have two babies of her own (2.09 to be precise)
• A Nigerian girl born this year will give birth to an average of 4.82 children
• A U.S. baby girl born in 2012 will have a 23% chance her marriage will end in divorce
• A U.S. baby girl born in  2012 will have a 41% chance that she will not marry
• There is a good chance this girl will be named Sophie!

Starting from the bottom up, details and reactions:

• Laura Wattenberg,author of The Baby Name Wizard, projects that this will be the most popular baby girl name this year.
• On marriage, that’s higher than I thought. Not too long ago Time did an article on marriage, and while many aren’t marrying these days, as I recall they reported most did.
• Divorce: that seems a better stat that the common percentage thrown around for some time now -50% or one out of two.
• Work to be done in Nigeria: Clearly better access to birth control!
• About 2 babies per woman: Continued increases in population mean more women, and more women giving birth even at this low rate compared to most countries still means population explosion!
• More people living longer will “continue to make a major contribution to world population expansion over the next half century, regardless of whatever progress might be made reducing fertility says Dave Foreman, author of Man Swarm.
• China–16 million-and that is still with a one child policy–wow.
• Foreman would say 4 million more babies this year is too many: At 310 million right now, unless we don’t do something right now, the U.S. population will “double in the next hundred years to above 600 million to even more than 800 million!”

Numbers like that make me pause.  Ok, I will no longer be here, but is this the direction I want the world to be going when I do leave it? I think not.

Time did a nice visual to lay out these numbers and more (like Brazil–a Brazilian girl born in 2012 has 25% chance of marrying before age 18; in the U.S. it is now the age of 30 if she has a college education), but even so, like I have felt since traveling to Brazil and Argentina, when it comes to population, I am left feeling, well, disturbed, and motivated to action.

Place to start: Check out the Rewilding Website Population Page, Optimum Population Trust, and get your socks knocked off with Foreman’s Man Swarm.

Who else is concerned about how we are going to pull off stabilizing the world’s population?

(Why it is a bit dark-not sure! 2012 resolution includes video software upgrade!)

The January question is in the On-the-Ground Question section to your right~

Top 5 Bingos to the DAO

1. You only had ONE child? Why didn’t you want more?

Doesn’t this sound like the one the childfree get, “Why don’t you want kids?”  The message to the DAO:  There must be something wrong with you such that you don’t want more than one. The message to the childfree: There must be something wrong with you that you don’t want any.

2. I guess you weren’t strong enough to handle more than one child.

This one makes me think of the one the childfree get, or at least the stereotype people often hold:  Our lack of desire to raise children somehow reflects a lack of psychological and emotional health.  The message underneath the bingo seems the same for the DAO on this one.

3. Did you ever think your child might be lonely without a sibling?

4. You don’t want your child ending up spoiled, do you? Your son needs a sibling!

5. Maybe if you were less selfish, you would do what’s best for (child’s name) and not what is easiest for you.

Now, 3-5 to me reek of the “selfish” bingo the childfree get.  Like having no children, somehow choosing to have only one child is somehow a selfish act.  Those doing the bingo-ing need to bone up on the research. Onlies don’t need siblings to have excellent childhoods, and just because they are the only child does not mean they will automatically be spoiled. And maybe it is not about what is “easiest,” (and actually so what if it is!) but about what the parents decide is best for them and their family.

So the childfree may have more in common with parents than we think–parents of one child, that is.  These bingos seem to imply that what is “normal” is not having A child, but more than one.  Would she get these bingos if she had two children? I think not.

Interesting how people don’t ask, Why Did you have kids? Why did you have the second one? Why did you have the third?? Or Why do you keep having more kids?  These are all taboo, even in a world in which it’s questionable whether we will be able to sustain our growing population.

Do the “why did you have them” type questions need to become less taboo, or like the DAO bingos, should people just keep the these kinds of queries and the judgements behind them to themselves?