My Parents Want Me To Be an Actuary; I Want To Run a Casino
By Lenore Skenazy
Dear Bintel Brief:
I’m 18 and reside on Long Island. My parents want me to be an actuary. (I don’t even know what that is; I think it has to do with birds.) But I want to attend Tulane University, enroll in their Casino Management program.
My mother (I love her dearly) hasn’t been to Las Vegas since the 1950s; she still calls Las Vegas “Zind [Sin] City.” I call it “The Entertainment Capital of the World.”
Yes, I know that many casino employees have seen their jobs eliminated in recent months because people are gambling less in this recession, but I’m convinced that the employment market will improve by the time I finish my coursework. Help!
A FRUSTRATED STUDENT
Dear Frustrated Student:
I totally get it. It must be VERY frustrating when your parents don’t take one single second to understand what kind of career might interest you. It’s like they’re PROUD of their ignorance.
Now go look up the word “actuary.”
Oh my! Nothing at all to do with birds, is it?
How dare you suggest that your parents don’t care about your deepest desires when you’ve never even bothered to look up the career they’re suggesting? You haven’t even GOOGLED “actuary.” And according to the second entry there — not too hard to find — an actuary is an expert in:
•Evaluating the likelihood of future events •Designing creative ways to reduce the likelihood of undesirable events •Decreasing the impact of undesirable events that do occur.
In other words (mine, not Google’s): AN ACTUARY IS SOMEONE WHO GETS PAID TO THINK LIKE A POKER PLAYER!!
Imagine that — your parents have been thinking deeply about your interests and skills and they even came up with a way you could use them to make a pile of money!
Back to Google, buddy. A simple search of “Casino manager, average salary,” finds that folks in the career you want to pursue start out at about $49,000 a year, and end up making an average of $60,000. Actuaries start out at $51,000–$61,000 a year, and end up making an average of $90,000. That’s an extra $30,000 a year you could save for a house or retirement or just go blow on the slots! What?
No one would be stupid enough to spend all their savings on slot machines since everyone knows the house always wins? Well, folks will be doing exactly that if you’re really good at “casino management.” Your job is to encourage them come lose their money.
See, I happen to agree with your mom: Gambling is a zind. That’s why the machers in your chosen field took a couple of consonants out of the industry’s name and started calling it “gaming” instead of “gambling.” They know that “gambling” has a long, sad history of sending optimistic folks home broke. They want us to think of it as something more along the lines of Monopoly: good, clean fun. (Not that I ever found Monopoly much fun at all. But still.)
What does it take to join this illustrious brotherhood? The “Casino Management” program at Tulane seems to consist mostly of hospitality management classes, statistics, economics and accounting. Seeing as how casino managers also find themselves in a field that has traditionally attracted shysters, mobsters, cheaters and hookers, there are also classes in legality. And there’s one class that comes “recommended” — on ethics. See above for why.
So it seems it’s not just your parents who are worried about the bed you want to lie down in. Tulane is, too.
But there is one more big factor we have not discussed yet — the ace of spades, as it were — and that is your age: 18. No matter how much your parents love you and vice versa, you are a young man now, not a child, and what you do with your life is up to you. So it really doesn’t matter if your parents approve of your major or not.
Who will pay for your schooling? Ah, that may depend on the career you decide to pursue. But that’s okay. You’re willing to take a gamble. Right?
July 27, 2009, 8:28pm
Help! I'm Sick of Overparenting My Kids
By Lenore Skenazy
Dear Bintel Brief:
I want to be a Free-Range parent, I really do. I want to let my kids have the same kind of fun I had as a child. But I am so paranoid it is ridiculous.
When I was in third, grade I used to walk a few blocks up the street to a small park where I would play for hours by myself. I now have a son in third grade, and couldn’t even imagine letting him do this by himself. I was always able to go and do almost anything I wanted from a very young age, but I can’t even begin to think about letting my kids do this.
I have three sons ages 8, 3, and 1.5. I am not a paranoid person when it comes to anything that has to do with me. I am very confident in myself. My 8-year-old is very smart and capable, but the thought of him even being outside by himself is enough to reduce me to a nerve-wracked pile of goo. I want to be able to do the things with my kids that I was able to do as a kid. I have no idea where my paranoia came from. It sure wasn’t my parents because they had no problem letting me go and do things by myself. I don’t watch much TV, because I don’t care for it, and what I do watch is just a couple of shows here and there. No news. Where is this fear coming from? How can I fight it?
SICK OF SMOTHERING
Dear Smothering:
I know the feeling, I really do — the nauseous fear when you picture something tragic happening to your kid.
That’s the problem: It is so easy to picture, because as a society, we are talking about it all the time. I know you don’t watch much TV, but everyone else does, and the second you turn on CNN, there’s another abduction story. Some people have started calling it the Child-Napping Network. Switch to “Law & Order” and there’s an adorable kid being snatched from the school yard. Turn on “CSI” and there’s another one being dredged from the swamp. The Mayo Clinic did a cool study comparing two seasons’ worth of CSI crimes to two seasons’ worth of actual crimes and found the biggest discrepancy is that on TV, almost all the crimes are committed by strangers, even though in real life that is not the case. Still, that is why you are a nerve-wracked pile of goo (lovely phrase): Our society is intent on making us feel that strangers are waiting to pounce on our kids 24/7, even though — this is the shocker — our kids are NO LESS SAFE THAN WE WERE! I know, I know — it’s almost impossible to believe. But when I was researching my “Free-Range Kids” book, I dug up the stats and here they are: The crime rate rose through the ’70s and ’80s, a sad, scary fact we all lived through. But then it started going down – way down — in the early ’90s, thanks to more policing, longer jail terms, cell phones (really!) and even the greater availability of psychiatric meds. With the criminally insane feeling less insane, they become less criminal. As a result, crime across the board is back to the level of 1970. So if you were playing outside in the ’70s or ’80s, your boys are actually SAFER than you were!
Remember the folks who put the kids’ pictures on the milk cartons (and didn’t bother to tell us the vast majority were runaways or kids taken by non-custodial parents in divorce cases? Drove us crazy with fear?). Anyway, they feel bad about sending out the wrong message about stranger danger now. I spoke to Ernie Allen, the head of that group — the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children — and do you know what he said? “Our message to parents is you don’t have to live in fear. You don’t have to feel you have to lock your children in a room.”
To keep kids safe he actually recommends teaching them how to get along in the world — how to cross the street safely, how to ask strangers for help, how to yell back at bullies — and then to let your kids go out! The safest kid is a kid filled with self-confidence. You’ll note that the word is not “parent-assisted” confidence.
How do kids get confident enough to stand up for themselves? By doing things for themselves! Walking the dog, organizing the kickball game, biking down the street to knock on their friend’s door, instead of waiting for us to make the playdate and then drive them a few doors down as if they’re under enemy fire.
You want your kids to have the kind of childhood you did — the kind you thank your lucky stars (and parents!) for. You can. Kids as young as 8 are spending an average of 6 hours a day staring at a screen now. With your encouragement, your 8-year-old can click “Off,” go outside and climb a tree.
He may come back dirty and a little sunburned. He may even have a few scrapes. But he’ll remind you of you, and smell like summer.
Lenore Skenazy, a former columnist for the New York Daily News and the New York Sun, now writes a syndicated newspaper column and hosts a topical humor contest that runs in The Week magazine. She is the author of “Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry” (Jossey-Bass), published in April, and “Who’s The Blonde That Married What’s-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know – But Can’t Remember Right Now” (Penguin), published in June.
If you have a question for the Bintel Brief, e-mail bintelbrief@forward.com. Questions selected for publication are printed anonymously.
July 20, 2009, 1:29pm
My Husband's Atheism Is Cramping My Style
By Lenore Skenazy
Dear Bintel Brief,
My husband and I had a Jewish home. We were active members of our synagogue and celebrated all the Jewish holidays. My husband recently declared himself an atheist and gave up on all things religious. I still want to light candles and celebrate Shabbat, have seders, etc., but he refuses to participate. His hostility has put a damper on my ardor. I don’t want to be the only one in my home to keep up Jewish traditions. What should I do?
MARRIED TO AN ATHEIST
Dear Married:
If I were a psychologist — and I’m not, I’m just a gal sitting here trying to solve the world’s problems while eating way too many cheese crackers (delicious!) — I’d say the nugget to examine here is not your husband’s sudden atheism, it’s this: “His hostility has put a damper on my ardor.”
If anyone just happened to read this sentence by itself, they might think it was describing a husband’s hostility to his wife, and the wife’s response — a dampening of ardor.
Which is sort of how this letter is sounding anyway.
For instance, if you suddenly developed a real aversion to your husband’s favorite food — say, herring — would you sit there and make retching sounds every time he fished a piece or two out of the bottle? A bottle you bought together, holding hands at the deli? Or would you try to breathe through your mouth so your husband could continue to enjoy his former favorite part of the day: the herring and beer moment?
If your goal is harmony, you’d shush already about how stinky herring is, because your husband being happy is more important than your (new) opinion of his crazy taste buds.
And that’s just herring.
Moving on: Suddenly, your husband is not just rejecting the Judaism you once both loved, he is rejecting what sounds like the very foundation of the life you’ve built together. The holidays. The temple. The traditions. Worse, he is angry at them all. He refuses to be in the same room with them. He doesn’t care if Judaism is something that fills your life with joy and meaning, he’s making the retching sounds so you can’t enjoy it either.
Growing up, we had a word for this behavior: Moorsah. It was either Turkish or Ladino, but whatever it was, it meant being in a bad mood and trying to get everyone else in a bad mood, too — exactly what your husband seems to be doing. Something is making him very miserable — either a religious crisis or something else that he or the religious crisis is masking — and he wants you to be miserable too.
“Now wait!” some cry: “If he’s no longer a believer, why should he pretend?”
Same reason we cheer our hearts out at the school play, “Max and the Giant Safety Scissors.” Not because the play is any good. It stinks! But sitting through it is a small price to pay for seeing our kid grin when he spots us in the audience. Being family means supporting our loved ones, not sneering at them.
So shouldn’t you support your husband’s newfound atheism, too? I do think it deserves some support and no sneering. You can listen to his doubts, and appreciate his struggle. You can let him know that you love HIM, even if you don’t see eye to eye on religion. But then you have to help him understand that lately he’s been throwing your relationship out with the holy water (so to speak).
Tell him if he wants you two to be a team, he should be a mensch and partake of family life, which happens to be Jewish family life. After all: If God doesn’t exist, what does it matter if you light some candles?
But it’s possible all this anger and hostility is actually having the very effect he wants, consciously or not, which is to wear you down and drive the two of you apart. If that’s his goal, the Bintel Brief cannot bring him back. Maybe therapy can. Maybe talking to a friend can. Maybe herring and a beer?
It certainly couldn’t hurt.
Lenore Skenazy, a former columnist for the New York Daily News and the New York Sun, now writes a syndicated newspaper column and hosts a topical humor contest that runs in The Week magazine. She is the author of “Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry” (Jossey-Bass), published in April, and “Who’s The Blonde That Married What’s-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know – But Can’t Remember Right Now” (Penguin), published in June.
If you have a question for the Bintel Brief, e-mail bintelbrief@forward.com. Questions selected for publication are printed anonymously.
July 13, 2009, 3:49pm
Help! My Daughter Is Seeking an 'Open' Marriage
By Lenore Skenazy
Dear Bintel Brief:
In 1995 one of my six daughters, married for the first time. We thought at the time that she was truly getting married, and I liked her young man. For maybe a dozen years before her marriage she had been leading an unconventional, “new-age” lifestyle in the San Francisco Bay Area, perhaps in rebellion against her conventional, Midwestern upbringing by her mother, my ex-wife.
Some time later, the two of them confided in me and my wife of 50 years that she and M___ were in an “open” marriage — meaning that each of them was free, with the other’s knowledge and consent, to take lovers. My wife and I didn’t say anything at the time, which my daughter and her husband interpreted as acceptance. On more than one occasion, they thanked us for our being so understanding.
In private discussions between us, my wife and I weren’t so understanding, and we agreed that this so-called “open” marriage was nothing more than a holding pattern until one or the other of them found in a lover someone more pleasing than their spouse. And so it has turned out; the husband jumped ship.
Subsequently, my daughter’s life has settled down. Curiously, she continues to socialize and spend holidays with, apparently without rancor, M___ and his new wife.
All of this sets background for the reason for this letter. To wit: In discussing her future with my daughter, I have on more than one occasion gently (I hope) suggested that she seek out a more conventional relationship. The last time I did so, she reacted with some heat, asking me not to raise the subject again. She defended her “open” marriage, declaring that statistics show that an “open” marriage are no more prone to end in divorce than conventional marriages, in which the which the taking of lovers is often carried out in secret and is truly a betrayal.
So here, finally, are my questions for Bintel Brief: 1). Is my daughter’s claim about statistics about “open” indeed true? And 2) If I should ever raise this matter again with my daughter, is there anything else of a non-moralistic nature that I could adduce to the benefit of a conventional marriage?
CONCERNED TATELE
P.S. My mother, of blessed memory, used to quote in Yiddish an example from Bintel Brief. The translation went something like this: “Dear Worthy Editor, I write to you not with ink, but with blood from a mother’s heart.”
Dear Tatele:
Wow, six daughters and one of them is choosing a non-traditional marriage, and you wish she could see the wisdom of the old ways? Mind if I call you Tevye?
Sure, you’ve got one girl more than the milkman, but still: Your beloved daughter is intent on making a match that seems meshuge to you, especially since the first time she tried it, it didn’t even work! The one advantage to open marriage, you’d think, is that at least a couple can stay together forever: Why divorce the cow when you can get the milk from all the other cows, too?
But that’s just the problem, says Hara Marano, author of a book all about young people falling apart, “A Nation of Wimps” (Broadway, 2008). When you keep consorting with everyone else, one of you is liable to fall in love. And even if this doesn’t lead to divorce, it usually leads to jealousy, which is about one millimeter away on the misery continuum. (Right next to incurable itching and a spouse who listens to the TV too loud.) Nearly inevitable jealousy is a straightforward argument against open marriage that you could make.
Except that your daughter seems to have emerged unmiserable and unjealous enough to still like her ex and the replacement wife and want to try it all again. So maybe an open marriage can make sense, at least for her.
Having written that line with zero conviction (if you’re Tevye, I’m Golde), I called Richard Woods, an author who lectures about open marriage — including his own. First off, he said, there are no statistics to give your daughter, because there are no hard numbers to base them on. Open marriage isn’t something you check off on your census.
Moreover, he said, the reason it’s not on the census is that open marriage “is the new gay.” Like homosexuality just a generation or two ago, most of the people practicing it don’t talk about it for fear of public censure. In fact, if it weren’t so taboo, Barack Obama might not be president today! Remember that Illinois Sen. Jack Ryan was uncovered as a “swinger” (a particularly unappealing one), leading to his resignation, leading to a young state senator winning his U.S. Senate seat, leading to a run for the White House and … you know how the story ends. A story that in itself began with a coupling many once found taboo: A black man and a white woman.
When you think about open marriage as an option that has been around for a while, quietly working for some people, it stops seeming quite so strange and starts becoming just another point along that long line of previously unthinkable liaisons that gradually became more and more accepted: Choosing Motl the tailor over an arranged marriage. Choosing a Bolshevik. Choosing intermarriage. Choosing someone of a different race. Or the same sex.
And even if it that kind of arrangement doesn’t make sense to you, Tevye, in the end it’s not up to you anyway. It’s up to your daughter. And maybe the sweep of history.
Lenore Skenazy, a former columnist for the New York Daily News and the New York Sun, now writes a syndicated newspaper column and hosts a topical humor contest that runs in The Week magazine. She is the author of “Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry” (Jossey-Bass), published in April, and “Who’s The Blonde That Married What’s-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know – But Can’t Remember Right Now” (Penguin), published in June.
If you have a question for the Bintel Brief, e-mail bintelbrief@forward.com. Questions selected for publication are printed anonymously.
July 9, 2009, 5:38pm
'Free Range' Mom Lenore Skenazy To Advise Forward Readers
By Bintel Brief
Columnist and humorist Lenore Skenazy will be answering readers’ questions as the Forward’s next Bintel Brief advice columnist.
Skenazy, a former New York Daily News and New York Sun columnist, now writes a syndicated column that appears in more than 100 newspapers. She also runs The Week magazine’s topical humor contest, “What’s Next?”
She is, perhaps, best known for letting her 9-year-old take the subway by himself, and writing about it last spring. Skenazy then found herself on “The Today Show,” “Dr. Phil” and even the BBC — defending herself as NOT “America’s Worst Mom.” She launched the blog “Free-Range Kids” to explain her parenting philosophy and when this proved popular, she went on to write the book, “Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry” (Jossey-Bass).
In June, Penguin published her totally unrelated book, “Who’s The Blonde That Married What’s-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know – But Can’t Remember Right Now” — the first trivia quiz book with questions that are all worded the way Skenazy’s parents used to talk. (for example, “Honey, what’s that Catskills dance movie with the guy in the tight pants and the ugly duckling actress before she had the nose job whose real life dad was the Cabaret guy?”)
Skenazy lives in Manhattan with her husband and their two sons.
If you have a question for the Bintel Brief, e-mail bintelbrief@forward.com. Questions selected for publication are printed anonymously.
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