Category: Art and Photography

Resource Dilution

As a family becomes bigger, family resources become diluted among the increasing number of siblings in the family. Only children get more time, attention, money, and verbal interaction from their parents than do children with siblings. As demographer Judith Blake put it, rather bluntly, families with larger numbers of children tend to dumb down family conversation and activities to suit the youngest children in the family instead of the oldest or the adults, and thus “becomes weighted with infantile minds.”

Because Angelica is an only child our household is geared toward the intellect of adults. This could increase her SAT scores and help her go to a great college and go on to graduate school if she so chooses. Because she is an only child, we have the money to get her Farsi and Russian lessons, as well as music and dance and sign language and really tailor her homeschool experience to her needs and strengths.

Project Talent was  a study that tracked 440,000 kids in high schools across the country until they were nearly 30. They tested the subjects for 32 types of intelligence and only children outscored others in 25 tests and equaled others in 4.

The book from which I am drawing this research is called One and Only, and is written by an only child who is also the mother of an only. It is an in depth, fascinating read even if it does have a natural bias.

Judith Blake is cited a lot throughout the book, and sometimes that isn’t a good thing. She tends to take the human factor right out of things. Big families are beautiful, and give you a network of people to love. It is true that a variety of researchers and writers including Dalton Conley have shown a real competitive advantage for only children. But then I look at friends who have 2, 3, 4, and 5 kids or more and see how much love they have and how their kids are never lonely.

Anyway, just doing some research on only children and birth order and finding some interesting facts.

Goals

Sometimes I feel confused about my goals. I want to get a book published, or do I? Am I prepared to play the game of submitting to contests at $25 and $30 dollars a pop? Most presses use expensive contests now to publish books.

Maybe it would be best if I tried to get a second chapbook published, and self publish a poetry book. If you self publish you don’t get literary acclaim and you don’t get to experience the purifying process of working with an editor. You do, however, get control of your book and to release your work out into the world without waiting for a middle man that might never come through.

I guess the truth is I hate submitting my work. I don’t mind the rejection letters. I just hate the process of struggling to find a press that even seems like it jives with my work, and then writing a mind numbing letter and inane bio. I know I should do it, but when I get free time I want to write and revise, not search and submit.

Every field has its dues that must be paid, and poetry is no exception to that. But sometimes I wonder about alternative paths, like blogging or self publishing. It doesn’t hurt to try. Or do I need to buckle down and start submitting again?