Helaine Olen

Thomas is not the first to point out that much of the booming baby business — a market she says is now worth $20 billion annually — is a bunch of bogus hocus-pocus designed to separate parents from their cash. Last year, the child advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that the claims made by Baby Einstein’s marketers amounted to false and deceptive advertising. More recently, the Education Sector, a well-respected research organization, released a report calling most so-called educational toys a crock.

But where Thomas’ book excels is in her dissection of the ways in which the marketing juggernaut ultimately affects us all. Toddlers without a television in their home still recognize Elmo. Marketing firms with innocent-sounding names like the Geppetto Group specialize in pitching products to kids and teens. Even politicians such as Sen. Hillary Clinton and President Bush have fallen for aspects of the consumerist toddler zeitgeist. In fact, they might be said to bookend the business: Clinton helped launch the craze in the mid-1990s when she began citing studies on the important role the first three years of life play in child development. And Bush gave Baby Einstein the ultimate product placement, mentioning it and creator Julie Aigner-Clark in his 2007 State of the Union address.

Salon caught up with Thomas in New York, where she discussed the origins of the baby buying boom, how marketers prey on Generation X parenting practices and why — and how — moms and dads should fight back.

When did the “baby business” boom, as we know it today, begin?

Well, in 1994, the Carnegie Corp. published a report called “Starting Points.” It was an investigation of new neurological research about how infant minds grow. It pointed out that you’re never more open than you are in the first three years — that’s when you learn the foundations of physical activity, emotional security and cognitive development. The report got the attention of Hillary Clinton and actor Rob Reiner, and they put together a White House Council meeting in 1997 on the importance of the first three years. The aim was to put political pressure on Congress for federal support for early childcare. But the lasting legacy of this conference was not federal funding for early childcare. It was the “baby genius” zeitgeist.

Right around the same time as the White House conference, another, more specious study came out about what was called “the Mozart effect.” It suggested that college-age kids would score marginally better on intelligence tests if they were played a certain section of a certain sonata by Mozart.

Julie Aigner-Clark, a very canny mother of a toddler, took note of that study. And she put together what we now know as the Baby Einstein empire, and Baby Mozart was the first video she developed. She based a lot of her ideas for stimulating the infant brain on this strange conflation of cultural trends: that babies were active geniuses and you really had to stimulate them adequately before they turned 3, otherwise they would never get into college, and the idea you would sort of be made smarter in math and spatial reasoning if you listened to Mozart.

But you write that there is no evidence that educational videos and the like do anything for infants and toddlers. So how do Baby Einstein and other similar companies convince parents otherwise?

Noam Chomsky said it best when he said the consumer economy takes our concerns, commodifies them and sells them back to us. If you look at the marketing rubric of, for example, Baby Einstein, what they talk about is enhancing a baby’s natural curiosity. But what’s so fascinating about it is that there is absolutely no research that undergirds those statements. There just isn’t any. It’s all marketing.

The book describes a number of companies that specialize in marketing materials to children, including Scholastic, the publisher of the beloved Harry Potter series. What is their strategy?

One of the things Scholastic started doing was to develop preschool curricula for media conglomerates. Disney, for example, is one of its biggest customers. Scholastic will develop a whole curriculum around a television show and have posters and activities and all kinds of things that preschool teachers can use. Disney pays Scholastic to develop it and offers it to the schools for free.

By and large, teachers and places are thrilled to have the free stuff. They’ll hang the posters on the wall and they’ll save the videos for a rainy day. It has a ripple effect because parents see that their child is watching Scholastic-approved videos in school, and they buy the idea that it must be educationally appropriate and vetted by the experts.

Many of the marketing firms you spoke with denied that they targeted their products to children under 3 — but admitted that a lot of kids that age still watch the videos. Is that a cop-out?

It’s disingenuous at the very best to say we don’t test children, we don’t conduct focus groups under the age of 3, or we know that they’re watching in record numbers but we can’t control that. But that’s basically their line.

Even “Sesame Beginnings” products came under fire from a lot of commercial watchdog groups when the company came out with a DVD that said it was for 6-month-olds through adults.

Wait a minute. What’s wrong with “Sesame Street”?

Well, when we — today’s parents — were watching “Sesame Street” as children, we were 4 and 5 years old. That is the target age for “Sesame Street.” But what we do now is put infants and toddlers in front of “Sesame Street.” Infants and toddlers are almost a completely different species from 4- and 5-year-olds. It turns out that an 18-month-old toddler has as much in common, cognitively speaking, with a 4-year-old as a 15-year-old girl does with a 75-year-old man.

It’s complicated for an infant or toddler to process television. When they are put in front of the television, the only thing they seem to be getting out of it in a verifiable way is character recognition. That’s why you see babies and toddlers so thrilled when they’re at the supermarket and they recognize Elmo. But still, it wears what the marketing industry calls an “educational patina.”

What is so awful about character recognition?

The problem is that the great social values that Elmo and the characters on “Sesame Street” teach are lost on children under the age of 3. They get solely a flat, one-dimensional character recognition. And the only other times that children are going to encounter the character are when a company is trying to sell the kid something. You don’t see Elmo running around your park. You see Elmo when he’s in diapers, when he’s on juice boxes, when he’s on Band-Aids and when he’s on toothbrushes.

But toys have been around a long time. How are these things any different from Shirley Temple dolls and Davy Crockett hats?

Those were never marketed to infants and toddlers. The other difference is that parents in the ’50s were much more involved with their children’s consumption of media. The family gathered around to listen to the radio or watch “The Mickey Mouse Club.” They were gatekeepers.

You also say that this merchandise may hold a generational appeal for today’s young parents. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Generation X-ers were often latchkey kids. For example, I often came home before my mom did and turned on the television. And in the ’80s, marketers — together with television production studios — came up with television shows that were basically commercials. You know, “Sesame Street” aired its first show in 1969 and its characters were really meant to be the village that raised American children. We have a soft spot in our hearts for these characters. So for many Generation X-ers, their happy memories of childhood are inextricably linked with consumer culture.

But a number of groups are countering those consumerist messages — most notably the American Academy of Pediatrics, which says without apology that there should be no television for children under 2. Why aren’t parents listening?

Today’s parents want to be as involved with our children’s lives as possible. That means more breast-feeding, attachment parenting and volunteering at the school. But everyone needs a break, and instead of just letting kids freak out or complain or whine or cry, Generation X thinks it is OK for them to spend that time in front of the television. Even the naysayers say, “I know that it’s not making him into a genius, but at least I can take a shower.” And this is really the first generation of parents for whom taking a shower has become a high-stakes proposition.

You have two kids. Did your research change how you parented them?

Absolutely. My daughter — at age 3 — came home from school talking about how certain girls at school weren’t allowed to play something called the Princess Game unless they had come to school wearing a dress with the colors of a particular Disney princess. It was shocking to me that Disney had penetrated at that level. We hadn’t shown her any of the Disney movies.

I said, “OK, if this is what’s going on in school we’ll get into it.” We just did our own study of Cinderella. We went to the bookstore and the library, and it turned out that almost every culture in the world has its own Cinderella story. So we got out “Cendrillon,” which was a Caribbean Cinderella story, and “Adelita,” which was Mexican, and a Chinese one. Then we got the Disney Cinderella book, then we got the traditional Brothers Grimm. Then we started asking her, How come we don’t see Cendrillon on Band-Aids? How come Adelita isn’t on any toothbrushes? Then when we went to the grocery store, I’d ask, “Why would they put SpongeBob on that macaroni and cheese? Does SpongeBob have anything to do with that?” We began to talk about how characters are used to try to sell stuff.

Is that a conversation all parents should be having? Or is there something to be said for just leaving kids alone?

Life itself is very stimulating — children don’t need a lot of this extra stuff. Just being with your parents and getting to relax and hang out, or even just sort of sitting in the bouncy seat and watching your mom type on the keyboard as she does her work, or going to the market, or just taking a nap and cuddling, is all the stimulation a baby needs.

Needless to say, things didn’t go according to plan. Rogers discovered that finding a suitable home, performing some quick and none-too-expensive renovations, and selling the home for a profit were a lot harder than they look on TV shows like “Property Ladder” and “Flip This House.” Soon she turned to brokering in Manhattan to pay the bills — and though she met with some success — the big payday she’d dreamed of still eluded her.

Earning a decent paycheck from real estate has never been easy, despite the gold rush mentality that has prevailed over the past decade. According to the National Association of Realtors, agents with two or less years of experience can expect to earn around $12,000 annually. In one semihilarious, semi-heartbreaking instance, Rogers lost a $65,000 commission on a multimillion-dollar Tribeca condo (“The kitchen alone, with its Bulthaup cabinetry and pietra del Cardoso stone, was probably worth six figures”) when, after negotiating a contract with the seller, her clients failed to wire the down payment money and vanished without an explanation.

Yet Rogers keeps her sense of humor and remains a true believer, sprinkling her memoir with witty and pithy tips on everything from how to make a successful lowball bid on a home to how to chat with a real estate agent. Nothing, it seems, will deter her — not even the current real estate market, with its rising mortgage rates and falling sales numbers. After all, insiders may be comparing the conditions of the current national real estate market with the Great Depression, but figures released this week also demonstrate continuing price increases in the New York City co-op and condo markets.

Rogers met with Salon in New York, where she discussed how the home-buying business favors brokers who offer bad service and why we should be wary of anyone who says he or she can predict where the market is headed.

Why are we so fascinated with real estate?

It’s a sport. It’s like a way of watching baseball where we can see the standings. It’s voyeurism and gossip and social standing and architecture and beauty.

What made you think you could become a successful home flipper?

I’d lived in New York City since 1988 and I had bought a succession of apartments. And like many, many other people who rode the real estate bull market, I made a lot of money. And I thought I made a lot of money not because I was lucky but because I was a genius. That’s a very common bull market mistake. You do a couple of successful deals and you’re like, “It must be me.”

And I saw all these people walking through the Post offices making all this money. And then I found partners in New Jersey I thought I could work with. In my naiveté I didn’t understand the extent to which I was looking for a needle in a haystack. If I had been willing to do this with my own capital and I could have taken lower returns, I could have done it. But I was looking for very high returns because I was trying to do this off of someone else’s capital. And the very-high-return projects are indeed needles.

Why are they so hard to find?

What I find out is happening is that the contractors get to the houses before anyone else really does. Very often a contractor is called in to work on a house. The roof leaks. Or this window needs to be replaced. So they see a great deal of the community stock. And when there’s something really good, they take cash out from under the mattress and they buy it.

Why do we all think flipping houses is so easy?

I think partly because it is a kind of sweat equity that we’re comfortable with. You know, a lot of us sit behind desks and we don’t really use our hands. And the idea of painting or repolishing a table or rubbing out some woodwork sounds a lot more reasonable than going out in the yard and building a sailboat. So it seems, if you’ll pardon the pun, sort of close to home. And then we have all these people on our TV look like they’re doing a wonderful job at it. There’s a visual TV culture which has brought us not only the idea but this set of images that go with it.

What did you learn about real estate as a flipper that you didn’t or couldn’t have learned as an editor?

I had read all the books that said you need to have a cash flow and you need to have capital. But I truly, truly didn’t understand that until I got into it. You need starting capital. Capital is almost everything. When I was sitting behind a desk (at the Post), the people I was interviewing made it sound easier to acquire than it actually has been.

You ultimately change tacks and become a real estate broker, handling both home sales and rentals. Yet you admit in your book that many brokers have a less than stellar reputation for a reason.

One of the phrases I like to use as an agent is: “All I want to do is give you the level of service you get from your Mercedes dealer.” And it’s really a sad commentary when I think that if I were as communicative and honest as a good car salesman, I’d be raising the standards of my profession.

The incentives are to lie and to push. Most Realtors are like that because the ability to transact quickly, even at the price of pushing their clients into deals, is what makes them money. Realtors don’t get paid till closing. If the industry were structured such that you would pay me a flat fee to run around with you as a buyer’s agent and explain to you the subtle differences between two towns, then I would be rewarded for being patient and being a font of information. But as it stands, if I’m patient and I’m a font of information and you don’t buy, I’m out of luck.

I also think clients don’t really compensate you for being laid back and better. Like, I have a smaller clientele, and my clients love me, and they refer. Which is great. But I think I probably also attract a lot of people who look around for six months and then don’t buy. I won’t shove them into buying. But on the other hand, my paycheck’s lighter because of that.

You have a number of stories in the book of people who look at homes for months — or years — and never make a purchase. What’s going on?

Why do you and I go into Saks and try on dresses that we may not end up buying? There’s a certain part of the aspiration curve where you do have to look at it to decide if it’s right for you. And a certain percentage of those people who are aspiring and trying to figure out if it’s right for [them] will go, “No, it’s really not.” But of course they’re doing that on my time.

Are you going to stay with it?

I’d like to keep agenting and keep writing at the same time. And I hope that there’s room for both. In my 20s, I always wanted to be a comedy writer. So now it just tickles me beyond words that this book is being seen as funny. On the other hand, I really like the satisfaction of getting someone the right home or selling someone’s home and watching the paycheck in their pocket enable them to do something that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do.

You write in the book that people coming into brokering with an upper-middle-class background have an advantage. Can you explain?

In general one of the huge advantages to being a broker is having a network — because when you start, before you’re proven, you sell to your friends. And the bigger your network of friends is, the better you do. A corollary to that is, the richer your friends are, the better you do.

There’s also a sort of sensibility. When I studied for my license in New Jersey, there were some poor African-American kids in my class. There’s this one girl who’s a hairdresser and she’s asking questions we would consider basics in the industry. She literally doesn’t know how agents get paid. Whereas I think most upper-middle-class people hear talk such as “I can’t believe I’m paying that firm 6 percent to sell the house” at the dinner table. And an upper-middle-class person who’s a salesperson doesn’t have to learn how to deal with poor people. A poor person who wants to be a salesperson wants to learn how to deal with people with money.

What’s the biggest lie brokers tell clients?

I think that we as an industry have gone out of our way to disseminate the myth that this is going to be easy. Moving is hard. Buying is hard. Selling is hard. Renovating is hard. These are all huge life changes. They’re all an incredible hassle. They’re all really hard to do as a single person. They’re even harder to do when there are family members involved. And I think we really have tried to tie it up in a bow and say, “Look, a new house will solve all your problems.”

What do you think is in store for the market next?

I always tell people that if I truly understood and could predict what would happen to a market, I wouldn’t have to be an agent. I could be a hedge fund guy on a yacht somewhere. So don’t believe anyone who tells you they can predict markets, because they’re always lying.

Ramin, now 50, embarked on an investigation of the causes and possible cures for middle-aged absent-mindedness after she began having her own brushes with forgetfulness. “My mental calendar, once easily summoned, grew elusive and developed blank spots,” she recalls. “Life became billowy, amorphous, as if someone had removed the support poles from my tent.”

Determined to beat back the fog, Ramin turned into a human guinea pig, experimenting with everything from memory-enhancing tests to cutting-edge pharmaceuticals and sleep research. She altered her diet, cut back on multitasking, reduced her stress levels and visited experts who study how memories are formed and retained. Her conclusion: We can’t stop time, but we can hinder its effects by taking better care of both our bodies and minds.

Salon sat down with Ramin in San Francisco, where she talked about the nature of memory, the curative powers of ballroom dancing, and why so many of us are scared to even say the word “Alzheimer’s.”

When did you realize you were losing your memory?

I noticed I’d started to forget things that I should have been able to remember. Once I went to a movie with my husband and five minutes out of the movie theater, I realized I did not know the name of the movie or the name of the main character. It was just gone, a blank.

Suddenly there were sinkholes, as if the information had just been sucked down the drain. And I started to notice a tremendous amount of what I called “content-less conversation.” I would exchange information, decide on a plan and then it would be as if nobody remembered what had been said. People were relating these stories over and over to me.

Do you think age-related memory loss is more shocking now because we view people in their 40s and 50s as relatively youthful?

Sure. Twenty-five years ago, someone in their mid-50s was entering a slower, more relaxed time of life. That is not the case now. Our concept of middle age has changed totally. It’s a boomer thing. We’ve never been willing to accept what comes along with any age.

Yet even though we do all these things to keep ourselves physically in shape — diet, exercise, you name it — no one has really dealt with the brain. People haven’t thought about keeping their brains in shape. To people, brains are not organs. But it’s not that different than your heart. You need to build up your cognitive reserve.

So along with aerobics, we should be doing crossword puzzles?

As long as you’re not too good at it! To keep your brain at top notch, you have to be challenged. You need to get out of your field and do something that works different parts of your brain. Ballroom dancing is fantastic for your mind. You need to remember all the steps. You need to deal with yourself in space, you are propelling yourself around a room in the hands of a partner, you can’t crash into other people. You can always add new and challenging steps. We’re not just talking about putting yourself in an armchair with crossword puzzles.

You write that one of the first things we lose with age is the ability to multitask, yet that skill seems to be more important to us than ever.

Multitasking is quite a complicated neurological process, but generally it has a great deal to do with the frontal lobe’s ability to switch from one task to another. And your frontal lobes are in far better shape when you’re 20 than 40.

But aren’t there reports that people in their 20s have begun experiencing problems multitasking, too?

Yes, there’s a Japanese researcher who studies people who use various technologies to aid memory. And apparently, the more people use those technologies, the less they’re able to actually retrieve from their own brains. It’s as if memory is moving off-line. High school students are not called upon to memorize in the way that we did. All you need is a keyboard or a hand-held if you want to know what year the French and Indian War ended.

What were some of the techniques you used to improve your memory and focus?

I saw a psychopharmacologist who said, “I don’t know if you have adult ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] but I think you should give Adderall a try.” It made me a lot faster and a lot sharper. I was able to juggle more. But I found I was thinking of work, work, work all the time and I simply wasn’t able to enjoy my life. It was as if I had been possessed.

In the course of my research, one of the drugs that surprised me was Provigil. Provigil was invented to treat narcolepsy. Then some scientists started to look at it in terms of improving attention. When I took it, I found what I call “the clear windshield effect.” It had a lot of the benefits of Adderall without the side effects. It worked very well with my word-loss issue. It also allowed me to do a little more multitasking. I had more working memory available.

But you don’t seem to think all drugs are a magic cure; in fact, you have a lot of unflattering things to say about antidepressants and their potential impact on memory.

Depression itself can have an effect on memory but I found that there is an uncorroborated and unscientific anecdotal relationship between specific antidepressants and memory loss. It’s not based on studies. And it will not be corroborated and I will tell you why. It is because the drug companies will never do those studies. They’re not pressured to. It’s not required of them by the FDA and it is to their extreme disadvantage.

How does what we eat affect the brain?

Well, we don’t eat very well. It’s very hard for us to absorb the nutrients that we need. Magnesium, for example, is critically important to midlife memory and cognitive ability. You must take it as a supplement because you would have to be a horse in an organic field to get enough. Magnesium has been leached out of the soil.

Then there is complex versus simple carbs. People don’t quite get that the brain runs on glucose. Without sufficient glucose delivered at the right rate, your brain runs out of fuel like your car runs out of gas. When you consume simple sugars — white bread, cookies, candy, potatoes — you get a glucose spike. It will make you sharp briefly. But it drops like a ton of bricks. With age, it becomes harder to recover from a plummeting glucose level. As you get older, the mechanism is slower, and you just simply don’t have the recovery time. What you need are foods that deliver glucose slowly, over a long period of time. That’s seven-grain bread, and nuts, and quite a few other things.

You also write about a psychiatrist — Daniel Siegel at UCLA — who is studying a possible connection between parent-child attachment and infant brain development. Siegel claims that moms who are emotionally unavailable to their young children are setting them up for problems with memory in adulthood. As a mother, I found this to be both intriguing and scary stuff. Can you explain why we should take his theory seriously?

It’s a very complex idea but I’ll try. Siegel is looking at the possibility that mothers who are unable to attach to their infants fail to provide them with a basic brain structure that allows for the consolidation of memory. It’s not about abusive parents at all. It’s about parents — particularly mothers — who are unable to build a connection with a child, possibly because they have their own problems to deal with. If a parent and child are unable to attach appropriately, this child is going to lack the scaffolding on which to post the events of his or her life. Adults who did not have that kind of attachment as infants often don’t remember their childhoods. But a lot of people get irritable about that theory.

I can see why.

Basically, the simple answer is that we need to look at brain health the way we look at maintaining other parts of our body. You don’t sit there and eat a stick of butter; you don’t smoke three packs of cigarettes. And if you do, you will have heart or lung problems. I think if you sit around and watch television, you don’t read, you don’t interact with other people — well, social interaction is very important. The more isolated you are the more likely you are to have your brain and memory start to fade.

But in America we isolate our old people.

We certainly do. It’s a terrible thing and it contributes heavily to the degree of Alzheimer’s disease we see. More than 70 percent of seniors over the age of 65 live alone. The brain needs social interaction and without it begins to fail. I don’t blame anyone — I don’t want that to be the idea.

In fact, I devote a big chunk of the book to the assessment and the intervention in Alzheimer’s disease. But people almost never ask me about it. It’s as if it is not in the book. People are very afraid to even address this. When I did the interviews and surveys, almost everyone insisted on being anonymous. Memory is such an essential part of you, of who you are, people can’t bring themselves to go public with their fears.

OK, I’ll take the bait. When does Alzheimer’s disease begin to develop?

Middle age. There is a time where forgetfulness either turns into something pathological or remains pretty steady. It’s very subtle, and this is where it’s typically not been diagnosed. I profile a judge in the book. He went to his physician and said, “I’m dropping sentences in my briefs. Things are not right.” The doctor says, “You’ve separated from your wife, you’re overworked, go take a vacation.” The judge comes back and says the same thing. The doctor says, “I think you’re a little depressed, we’ll give you some antidepressants.” Six months later he’s starting to get lost in the car and that’s when they sent him for a work-up.

So there is this gray area: It can be as early as your early 50s and go into your mid-60s. That’s when people are starting to get diagnosed. And that’s going to be an increasing trend, because the technology is starting to be available for early intervention.

Can doctors do anything?

Yes. There are clinical trials. And if you know that things are not looking good you have a choice to make. You can let it go or you can start on various interventions and trials. Now you’re going to have to have balls to go into some of these. Some of these trials, vaccine trials, especially, there’s risk involved. And a lot of people will not want to take that risk.

Does anything about our brains improve with age?

Vocabulary. You keep learning new words and you don’t forget them. But that does not mean that you can produce them! As we get older we blank and we block. We can’t retrieve the word in the middle of a conversation.

I remember hearing that older people are better at predicting outcomes?

That’s true. We can make certain valid assumptions based on previous experience, that younger people cannot. You can look at your daughter’s boyfriend and realize in about 20 seconds that this is not going to work. But it will take her about two years.

So what is memory to us?

Memory is everything. Memory is who we are. When it goes, there is nothing left there. It’s what we know about our lives. When it goes — as it does in Alzheimer’s disease — people don’t necessarily lose the ability to get up or eat a meal or go for a walk or sit in a chair. They lose themselves.

While reporting, Denfeld immersed herself in street culture. She discovered that since the 1990s, organized groups with names like Nihilistic Gutter Punks and the Sick Boys have risen to rule the homeless youth communities of America’s urban centers. Controlled by self-appointed “moms” and “dads,” these “families” are often far more rigid, controlling and violent than those the kids fled. Members commit muggings, deal drugs and participate in gay-bashing incidents. Still, police in many cities pay them little attention, instead focusing their energies on more traditional gangs.

While estimates of their number vary, most child welfare advocates estimate that there are approximately 1.5 million street kids in the United States and that the majority belong to a street family. Denfeld believes the social causes behind the growth of such groups are numerous — ranging from the economic breakdown of blue-collar America to the influence of fantasy games on youth culture. Crackdowns on teenage prostitution are also implicated, since by making the streets safer, municipalities may have unwittingly created an environment conducive to the development of proto-adolescent societies. “The cleaned-up streets offered a new playground” for these kids, Denfeld explains. “Isolated from other influences, they create a fantasy world all of their own.”

Salon spoke to Denfeld by phone about the role that racism plays in street violence, the influence of the Internet and fantasy games on street kids, and why we should take their threats seriously.

What is a street family?

We all know street kids. They’re the kids that hang out in Tompkins Square Park or the university area of Seattle or in downtown Portland. What a lot of people don’t realize is that these street kids have created their own subculture. They’ve organized into tight-knit groups that have a lot in common with gangs. They have group affiliations. They have street names. They have their own language. It is a society with a lot of rules and codes, a great deal of secrecy. And often, they’re frankly just incomprehensibly violent.

When did individual street kids begin to form street families?

The shift began happening in the late 1980s when a lot of cities began taking child prostitution very seriously. There was a focus on giving homeless youth services, whether it was showers or food or job programs. But they didn’t eradicate the presence of young people in the street. Instead it enabled a different kind of subculture to grow. The youth weren’t reliant on prostitution anymore. Instead they were fed and clothed and remained unsupervised. They began kind of creating their own subculture.

What impels these kids to live on the streets?

There are a lot of genuinely homeless youth. A couple of the kids involved in the assault on Jessica Williams had terrible histories. But when I first began researching, I expected that most of the youth involved in the murder of Jessica Williams would have backgrounds of foster care, abuse and neglect. In fact, the opposite was the case. Many of them came from very adequate families, even very loving homes. One was a college student who walked out of her dorm room and a scholarship. Another young man had a mother who had been a police officer. I think a lot of them hit the streets because it sounds romantic.

How old are these kids?

In the 1980s, 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds were on the street. That’s our perception of what we call street kids: They’re actual kids. But in reality, the majority of these youths are now adults. Ages have risen to the point where in one shelter review I found, the majority of the youth intakes were ages 18 to 20. They aren’t minors. A street kid is a defined social identity. It’s the same as saying, “I’m a Crip” or “I’m a Blood” or “I’m a Skinhead who belongs to the Aryan Nation.”

So, you see similarities between gangs and street families?

Both gangs and street families are organized groups with a strong group affiliation. Street kids in families are very loyal to their leaders. Their leaders are identified as Mom and Dad. The youths identify each other as Brother and Sister. There are very strict codes of conduct, a highly developed hierarchal system. Like gangs, these kids have a very strong identity just to that particular group. And there are very savage punishments if you break their code.

The difference is that a lot of African-American and Mexican gangs tend to still have strong ties with a particular community. They might still go home to Grandma’s house or be living with their mom. But the street-family culture really encourages the youth to completely severe all ties with their original families and their communities. I think that has profound psychological impact on them. The street family becomes their reality.

Still, the police don’t seem to take street families as seriously as gangs. Why?

Historically the focus with drug dealing and criminal activity has been on African-American and Mexican gangs. Here in Portland, the gang task force — like other city gang task forces — has overlooked the role of street kids. Part of it is a public-perception problem. People have a very romantic notion of street kids. In some cases, when police did crack down on the crimes of these street families, they were criticized for doing so. People aren’t generally aware that street families exist or that they commit a lot of crimes and violence.

Does racism influence our perception of street families?

I wouldn’t say it’s overt racism. But perhaps partially because these youths are Caucasian, we just think that they’re teenagers in mohawks hanging out in the street. I think if African-American youth were hanging out in our square or in the East Village or any of these cities and had formed into packs and given themselves names and organized a very elaborate, often brutal subculture, we would say, “That’s a gang,” and would rush to intervene.

Is it just a few bad players who give street families a bad reputation?

I found an amazing amount of violence within this subculture. A lot of the youth are armed. They carry knives or what they call smiley chains, which are chains that are linked into a circle. If you actually talk to them, they speak with ease about the violence they commit. It wasn’t just the one particular street family I followed. I documented hundreds of crimes that other street families in the area had committed, often very violent crimes like muggings and hate crimes against gays. They call it “rolling trolls,” which is their term for mugging gay men.

But don’t you worry that you might be tarring street families with a broad brush by using a murder to examine their society?

That’s something a lot of advocates came out and said when the Jessica Williams murder happened. They said, This is an anomaly. This is an aberration. This is very rare. But my reporting found that violence is not rare. In fact, violence is the defining aspect of the culture. It’s how they keep each other in line. Violence is at the core of the fantasy games that they play to occupy themselves and to give themselves a sense of group identity. If they didn’t have their fantasies and their games and their “code,” as they call their rules, there wouldn’t be much to actually hold these youths together on the streets. It gives them identity.

Where does that violent urge come from?

It’s a natural outcome of having a lot of teenagers and young people running around on the streets unsupervised. Traditionally, most societies recognize that between the ages of, say, 18 to 20, young adults still need some guidance to help them develop strong morals and ethics. It’s an age of energy and ambition. What really struck me was that the kids just have nothing to do. They’re fed and clothed by shelters, and then they have the rest of the day to hang out and panhandle and do whatever. So it’s not that surprising that they spiral into a savage society.

Does the economy play a role?

One girl named Sara fascinated me, because she was 20 and from a blue-collar background. In the past, she would have expected to get a solid job, marry, buy a house, raise a family. But we don’t expect or even desire that from our young adults anymore. We’ve continuously moved the age of adulthood up to the point where there’s a vacuum from the late teens to early 20s, particularly for young people who aren’t going to college. They’re bored. They don’t have meaningful work. And we don’t particularly want them to have kids that young. They’re looking for a sense of identity and something to consume the incredible energy and risk-taking behavior of their age, and they can end up on the street.

And then there is the white supremacist influence…

Because we have a higher and higher number of young people sentenced to jail or juvenile homes, there’s a trickle down between the criminal justice system and the street culture. And what you have in prison is a very racist, segregated and violent society. A lot of street-family culture is influenced by that. These are not benign, progressive sorts of kids. They’re often very racist and very homophobic and very sexist, and they’re open and accepting about it.

You say the Internet plays a role in street-kid culture, too. How so?

A lot of street kids are very computer savvy. I was surprised to meet kids that not only carried cellphones but also have laptops in their backpack. Through Web sites like Digihitch.com, a street kid can walk into a shelter, sit down at a computer, and within seconds be contacting and communicating with street kids in other cities. The Web has helped street kids become uniform in their subculture. So, whether you go to Seattle or New York or Minneapolis or any other place, you’ll find that street kids are all talking in the same language and all have the same codes and the same rules.

What impact do drugs have on street families?

Drugs have made a huge impact on the street culture. Portland is a very meth-affected city. And meth is well documented for inducing psychosis. Some street kids have become heavy methamphetamine users. Many of them deal methamphetamine as well as other drugs. It has made them a lot more violent, a lot more criminal. And it’s also the kind of a drug that will facilitate a lot of their paranoia and fantasy games.

Can you explain that a bit more? You talk a great deal about the influence that fantasy-gaming culture has had on street families.

Over the past decade, through “Dungeons & Dragons” and computer fantasy play and gaming, it’s becoming increasingly acceptable for people in their 20s to spend hours a day engaged in adopting mythical characters or pretending they are part of a medieval society. A lot of young people are taking this fascination and acceptance of fantasy play with them into street culture. They will get engaged in elaborate, real-time fantasy games as part of this culture. They might perform rescue missions or decide that somebody offended them and have a mission to go punish the perpetrator.

Once they get on the streets, these youths take street names that are very important to them. In this particular case, the kids took names like Shadowcat and Gambit and Neo. They become absolutely enmeshed, sometimes to the point where I suspect that they really had trouble discerning reality, and started identifying exclusively by their fantasy name. Frankly, I was bowled over that the social service agencies that serve the youths will call them by their made-up, fantasy names.

Do you think that’s a problem?

I do have a problem with it. Say you have a 19-year-old methamphetamine user who wants you to call him Gambit. My sense as a parent is you say, “Excuse me. Your name’s Steve, and you need to get a job.” If my kids were teenagers who showed up in a youth shelter and said, “Call me Shadowcat — I’m part of a street family,” I’d want that agency to pick up the phone and tell me to come get my kid. But the agencies go along with a lot of these fantasies and run the danger of really perpetuating the culture and endorsing it, making it acceptable.

It seems like you’re not alone in that feeling. In the book, you speak with one district attorney who is vehement that social service agencies, by offering these kids food and shelter, “enable” street culture.

You know, honestly, I’ve wrestled with that. I think it’s an easy assumption to make, because these agencies do in fact feed and clothe these youth — and in many cases don’t hold them accountable or truly supervise them. On the other hand, there are really strong street-family cultures in towns and cities without a lot of youth agencies. One example is Tempe, Arizona, where a really big street-family culture has sprung up without a single youth agency in town. A lot of street kids support themselves very well through panhandling and drug dealing. But my feeling from my reporting is that if agencies were a little more skeptical in serving youth who are not genuinely homeless, youth who are using their services to support a criminal lifestyle, it would probably be a good step in fighting this subculture.

Did you find anything good in the street-family culture?

No. What is really striking about it is in the past we had hippie cultures and the punk cultures. And there were certainly a lot of criminals that intersected those cultures, but they were largely about something kind of productive and exciting and artistic. I think that today any energy that street families have is consumed by crime, meth and fantasy games. Anything that is happening creatively is far outweighed by the dangers that these youth pose to themselves and to each other.

What’s the future for street families?

It’s a culture that is growing and has solidified into a very solid, permanent subculture. My concern is that it’s going to become more and more violent as these youths commit crimes and violence, go away to prison, then get back out on the streets.

Erotic desire, Perel argues, thrives on mystery, unpredictability and politically incorrect power games, not housework battles and childcare woes. Furthermore, increased emotional intimacy between partners often leads to less sexual passion. “The challenge for modern couples,” she writes, “lies in reconciling the need for what’s safe and predictable with the wish to pursue what’s exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.”

Traditionally, Perel points out, marriage was a business relationship, designed for procreation and economic survival. It asked nothing more of its partners than stability, reliability and a day-to-day ability to get along. Recent generations added romantic love and sexual passion to the mix, followed by demands for equality after the resurgence of the feminist movement in the late 1960s. As our society placed new requirements on the institution of marriage without stripping away much of its historical functions, we responded by expecting our spouse — one person — to provide what in the past it had taken an entire village of people to give us.

Perel, who was born in Belgium and has been married for more than 20 years, views our dilemma with an outsider’s perspective. Her advice is refreshingly counterintuitive: Communicate less with our spouses about the minutiae of daily life and speak more with the language of our bodies and our secret desires. Pursue interests outside of work, marriage and the family. Open up about our fantasy lives. Flirt and play with both our spouses and others. And get the kids out of the literal and figurative bedroom even if you have to rent a hotel room to do it.

Salon met with Perel in her New York office, where she discussed the difficulties of combining long-term love with erotic desire, why Americans need to learn to play more in their personal lives, and the modern cult of childhood.

Why do you think so many couples have trouble keeping desire alive in long-term relationships or marriages, even when they are extremely loving?

Relationships are crumbling under the weight of our expectations. We want marriage, companionship, economic support, family life — and then on top of that we want our partner to be our best friend, confidant and passionate lover. For a long time the idea that passion and marriage could go together was a contradiction in terms. Marriages were about economic criteria. When you chose your mate, or somebody chose your mate for you, sex did not enter into the equation.

Are long-term love and eroticism ever compatible?

I think that they’re not inherently incompatible. But why is it so difficult? There is in the experience of love an experience of security, of predictability, of safety, a kind of grounding and anchoring. And eroticism thrives on something very different. It thrives on the unknown and the mysterious, on the unexpected. It’s not what you want in a long-term, secure relationship.

Is that true across all societies?

I think that some societies have it more and some have it much less, depending on how much the society experiences seduction and sensuality and flirtation as part of its ecology.

Where does the United States fall on that spectrum?

People don’t play much in the United States. Flirting, where you play with the possibilities, goes against the goal-oriented, pragmatic approach Americans often take — which is, if you go out, you go out to score.

But there’s sex all around us — in music, on TV, in film. Are you saying we’re not an erotic culture?

Animals have sex. Sex is an instinct, it’s the primordial instinct. But eroticism is sexuality transformed by the human imagination. It is exclusively human. That makes all the difference. It is playful, and in that sense it is inherently unselfconscious and carefree. It has no other goal than the cultivation of sex, of pleasure for its own sake.

Are Americans more comfortable talking about sex than erotic love?

There is a fundamental discomfort about sexuality in our society. That’s why on the one hand sex is ubiquitous but we also hang onto these attitudes that are very sex averse. You get both extremes in this country — abstinence education and talk shows that blabber off every detail of people’s lives.

How does the erotic die in long-term relationships?

Often it’s not that the erotic energy is gone, it’s that it has left the couple. It may be quite present in the house, but it’s been transferred onto children or work. I saw a couple recently who had become best friends. In 20 years, they’d had one night apart. They put their passion into making a beautiful home, building the whole thing from scratch. They also put their passions into creating a business together. They have passion. And it’s erotic passion, in the sense of aliveness, vibrancy and vitality, but it is not a sexualized passion.

There is a notion people have that in the beginning of relationships passion is spontaneous. They actually forget that the beginning was one big story line. There were hours spent anticipating, planning, plotting, developing the script, imagining what you’re going to wear, what you’re going to eat, where you’re going to go, the whole thing. But people remember things as explosive and in the moment and unplanned. And that’s not true. But passion can die because we forgo the willfulness, the intentionality and the imagination that fuel the erotic.

Many of us hope that our marriages will be models of equality between best friends. Yet in your book you say equality and friendship are not necessarily the best ways to preserve erotic love.

I think the equality model is something that we want in everyday life with our partner. But it can have unforeseen negative consequences in the bedroom. Fantasies are rarely egalitarian, I can tell you that. Friendship is a different story. Best friends share everything, talk about everything. And when you’re lovers, you want mystery. I’ve never in my life called my husband my best friend.

Do you think many of us are uncomfortable with fantasy and power plays in the modern conception of long-term relationships and marriage?

The women’s movement needed to address the abuses of power. Nobody would ever challenge that. But in the course of doing that, it had some unanticipated consequences, including attempting to neutralize power in places where power is intrinsic. Such as in desire. An element of aggression or hostility is often part of erotic desire. It’s not just joy and contentment. There is another side to desire and it’s that that we have become uncomfortable with feeling and expressing. The whole point of fantasy is that it’s not meant to be reality. We can experience these feelings very comfortably and playfully with a partner, without fearing, What does it say about me?

You say parenthood can have an effect on erotic desire too.

Family life needs constancy, predictability and stability. What eroticism thrives on, family life defends against. And at this point there is an unprecedented child centrality in our culture. We have a kind of a sentimentalization of the child — well, that’s the only value that they have at this point. They don’t produce anything and they drain us economically. You put that child centrality combined with a model where the survival of the family depends on the happiness of the couple, and basically you get a 50 percent divorce rate in first marriages. Kids get the latest fashions and adults walk around in college sweats. Kids get languorous hugs and adults must make do with a diet of quick pecks. We need to re-create some boundaries.

Can the erotic nature of the parent-child bond create a lack of passion between a married couple?

There is a powerful, sensual, erotic connection between the mother and an infant or a newborn. There is tickling, kissing, nibbling. Then there is the gaze, that kind of adoring gaze of this little child. It’s often very similar to when the couple was first meeting. And it is a sensuality that is more akin to the way that I think female sexuality is organized, that it’s less genital, that it’s more full bodied, that it’s more subjective and contextual. When the mother says to her husband at the end of the day, “I have nothing left to give,” I have, on occasion, had to say, “Maybe at the end of the day, there is nothing more that you need.” You’re satiated. And it is intoxicating, it’s like it fills you up completely; it’s no surprise that one wouldn’t need the scruffy guy after that. But it’s not easy to acknowledge that. And it’s not what kids need either. They need parents with a healthy sex and emotional life. It gives room for the child to go and do what explorations they need to do and not become the physical and emotional caretakers of their parents.

You don’t view a lack of sexual fidelity as a big problem, as many couples — and many therapists — believe it to be.

Monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal. That’s why adultery is such a crucial issue. There is a moral edge that many Americans bring to this without sometimes looking at many factors that bring a person to stray. Our model is that marriage is for everything. So, we think if it didn’t work out with you, I’m not going to think that maybe there is something to question about my model, I’m just going to say I chose the wrong person and I’ll go somewhere else to get everything. And there is something about not wanting to give up on that ideal that makes people more willing to go for divorce, and the dissolution of the entire family system and all the bonds, than the willingness to renegotiate boundaries.

How has your own marriage affected your beliefs?

I say I have had three marriages with the same person. I think we reorganized our relationship completely, at various stages in our life. I married my mentor. Something shifted completely when we had children. I think a third shift took place when our parents died. And what shifted? The balance of interdependence. The power balance, the boundaries between us, the level and kind of negotiation. The balance between togetherness and separateness.

You write that we need to speak with our bodies as well as with language. How do we do that?

I think that our mother tongue is the language of the body. Every mother that has touched a child knows how she spoke with the child and how the child spoke back with his or her body. It is our original mother tongue, long before the first verb is ever spoken. We should certainly not reduce ourselves to just the spoken word. We really need that instrument that we play here, that often is able to express things very differently. I mean, people sit here on the couch and they talk, talk, talk, talk, and then finally somebody puts the hand on the other and it just speaks volumes. That’s what they needed, touch. We all need to be touched.

We know that approximately 12 million of the 19 million Americans who are estimated to suffer from depression annually are female, and that its incidence peaks between the ages of 25 to 44, the years a woman is most likely to have kids. That is probably not a coincidence; a study published by the Journal of Health and Social Behavior in December 2005 found parents significantly more likely to report depression than their childless counterparts. However, firm numbers on depression in moms themselves are hard to come by. Thompson claims 4 million, but admits that is only a guess.

Yet the emotional distress of “Ghost’s” maternal sufferers is undeniable. Thompson weaved their stories throughout her book to highlight both her own experiences and ongoing research on the topic, making it clear that mommy misery affects more than just a few chattering-class parents with media access, like recent chroniclers Judith Warner and Leslie Morgan Steiner. “I went through periods that I just yelled all the time,” one mother wrote. “Then I would be sad, cry and not get out of bed.” Another said, “Friends or neighbors would come over and I just wouldn’t go to the door,” adding, “It was just overwhelming, day to day, taking care of three little boys.”

Ultimately, however, Thompson is more concerned with cure than cause and it’s hard not to notice that most of the tales told in “Ghost” end, like her own, with someone reaching for a bottle of pills. While one is happy to hear of reduced misery, it does make one wonder how “The Feminine Mystique” would have turned out if written today. Betty, meet Zoloft.

Salon talked to Thompson recently by phone about the many manifestations maternal depression takes and how society may contribute the problem.

Who is the ghost in the house?

One e-mail from my survey said “a depressed mother is a vacant mother,” and I got this image of a house that didn’t have anybody in it — a depressed mother is there in body but not in spirit.

Is it considered taboo that mothers, who are supposed to bask in the joy of their children, could feel any other way?

There is particular stigma attached to talking about depression in the context of motherhood. The cultural ideal we have of motherhood has no room for days in which you just don’t want to even hear your child’s voice. Motherhood is not supposed to be that way. Motherhood is supposed to make you happy. There is a widespread perception that postpartum depression is the beginning and end of the story for mothers. Yet, this other part is very, very real. Maternal depression is, to me, where depression and motherhood intersect. And it’s where depression on the part of the mother reaches out to ensnare the kid. It begins to define your interactions in ways that are harmful, both to the kids and to the mom.

What tends to characterize maternal depression?

Some mothers experience it as being very, very withdrawn and totally nonresponsive. The other symptom is hyper-irritability, and I have to confess, that’s the worst thing for me. If I’m really, really depressed, I’m super-sensitive to noise and even happy noise is painful, and if the kids are fighting or something I just can’t stand it.

How does maternal depression affect children?

Depression in a mom teaches kids depressive ways of thinking. Like there’s a kind of all-or-nothing thinking such [that] if one thing goes bad then it means that other things are going to go bad, and it means furthermore that you’re bad and that probably you caused it. A lot of the women in the survey wrote about what perfectionists their kids were, and how they didn’t give themselves credit for their own accomplishments. They tend to have more school difficulties, social adjustment difficulties and anxiety. They are also much more likely to suffer from depression as adults.

Could your book just make mothers feel guilty, like, here’s something else we’re doing wrong?

Well, you should feel guilty if you know you’re depressed and you know you’re doing bad things to the kids and you don’t get off your duff and do something about it. It can be as simple as going to doctor and describing symptoms. He or she can suggest a psychiatrist; you take a short-term dose of Zoloft and you are better. A lot of times it is more complicated than that. Medication is not always the answer. Cognitive behavior therapy helps a lot. I talked to several women who say exercise basically controls their symptoms. I’m not saying women who don’t take care of it are bad moms, just that these are women who are suffering from an illness.

Is it really all biological or hormonal as some would have us believe, or do the conditions of modern motherhood contribute to depression at this point or even cause maternal depression for some women?

The roots of depression are complex, but one essential ingredient for it happening is stress. The standards for what constitutes a good mother have been ratcheting upward for the past 20 or 30 years. When I was a kid and I was bored, my mom would get out the ironing board and say, “This ought to keep you busy.” These days parents, particularly mothers, feel obligated to provide their kids with quality time and enriching activities. One of the mothers in the survey wrote to me that she sometimes feels guilty if she reads the newspaper while her little boy is eating breakfast. There’s no such thing as just sitting in a room with the kid and hanging out — you’ve got to be “doing” something.

You write about postpartum depression being affiliated with various stressful conditions in pregnancy and childbirth such as a traumatic delivery and post-birth isolation. Do you think it’s possible that the way we have children in this country is encouraging maternal depression?

I definitely think that not having a network of women around you right after you have the baby is a contributor. Maybe I’m overstating this because I felt the lack of it so acutely, but there are other cultures where women are put in a little hut and told not to do anything for 40 days, and other women take care of them and it’s just accepted. That’s what you need after you give birth. I think we’re insane the way we handle birth in this culture. After six weeks of maternity leave, you’ve got to throw on pantyhose and schlep back downtown.

If we changed the societal expectations of and pressures on mothers, would be there be less maternal depression?

I think the culture we live in puts unrealistic expectations on mothers. Motherhood can seem like a competitive sport, like being a good housewife in the 1950s. If we had a more realistic idea of motherhood and more social support, like better-quality childcare, then I think the stress level overall would decrease and that in turn might contribute to less maternal depression.

What do you think in society could change to make this problem less common or severe?

Figuring out that motherhood is really hard work and it has occupational hazards and this is one of them. It’s a job, and it’s not always an easy job. Men have always known this, otherwise they’d be clamoring to stay home. We need to get people to take motherhood as a topic seriously and do more than just pay lip service to it as an institution. And then to get mothers to take themselves seriously. They can’t take care of their kids if they’re not taking care of themselves.