Expectant moms — especially those in the third trimester — are more vulnerable to the effects of influenza, because of changes that happen to the lungs and immune system that make it harder for them to shake off respiratory infections, Dr. Kevin Ault, an Emory University obstetrician told the AP. In a recent report on H1N1, the World Health Organization found that pregnant women appear to be “at increased risk for severe disease, potentially resulting in spontaneous abortion and/or death, especially during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy.”

The CDC’s advisory committee on vaccines will meet on Wednesday to decide who should receive priority in getting the vaccinations when they become available, likely in October 2009. It’s probable that health workers, who are on the front lines in treating patients with the flu will be first, but pregnant women may get bumped up to second in line.

Yet, if the H1N1 vaccine becomes available to them, will pregnant women take it? Only about 15 percent of pregnant women get vaccinated for seasonal flu, although the CDC recommends that they all should. Thanks to those unfounded fears about vaccines causing autism that just will not die, some women are concerned that the flu vaccine will harm the developing fetus.

Doctors say the vaccine actually protects both the mother and the baby-on-the-way. And when an infant is born, some of that immunity stays with them for the early vulnerable months of life. One study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2008 found that flu shots given to pregnant women reduced flu in infants by 63 percent.

The U.S. hopes to have 160 million doses of the H1N1 flu vaccine available in October. In the meantime, for some sensible tips on staying healthy — yes, vigorous hand washing! — click here.

With demand for the rare tuna showing no signs of abating, the market for it has grown more feverish. At the highest level of bluefin mania, a single fish that weighed 444 pounds was sold at auction for $174,000 in 2001. Since the tuna jackpot can be so huge, it’s no surprise that the weak regulations that exist to curb overfishing have been flouted by greedy constituents of the fishing industry, which put short-term profits over long-term sustainability.

But now conservationists, with help from Hollywood, are trying to transform bluefin from a status symbol to an environmental mark of Cain. In June, inspired by the muckraking documentary “The End of the Line,” Sting, Elle Macpherson, Alicia Silverstone, Sienna Miller and Charlize Theron signed a letter, pleading with chef Nobu Matsuhisa to stop serving the fish.

Actress Greta Scacchi and Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame stripped naked for an ad campaign to raise awareness about the bluefin’s fate. In May, Nobu’s New York outpost, more commonly the haunt of hedge-fund managers than raging activists, was the subject of dining-room activism by Greenpeace. Picketers carried make-believe menus, advertising such endangered-species delicacies as “Rack of Mountain Gorilla Seasoned with Powdered Rhino Horn ($32.00).”

“It’s crazy for people to still be eating critically endangered species,” says John Hocevar, a marine biologist with Greenpeace, who recently spent two and half weeks on a boat off the coast of Malta, Italy, and Tunisia patrolling for illegal bluefin fishing operations. “Eating bluefin is like eating cheetah or rhino.”

Yet despite all the pressure, Nobu has refused to stop serving the fish. Under pressure from the campaigners, the restaurant has put an asterisk next to the delicacy on the menu at its London locations, advising diners that the fish is “environmentally threatened.” But Nobu is not the only bluefin offender. While some high-profile celebrity chefs, such as Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey, have pledged to boycott the fish, it is still served at most high-end sushi restaurants around the world.

Many of them, including Nobu, don’t list a price on the menu, but instead say “m/p” or “market price,” depending on the cut and quality of the fish that’s available. In other words, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

And many restaurants that carry bluefin don’t exactly boast about it, but feature it for those in the know. In 2008, wait staff at Nobu denied serving the fish until DNA testing exposed their lie. If you’re quoted an eye-popping price for “toro” on a sushi menu, that’s likely bluefin, explains Casson Trenor, author of “Sustainable Sushi: A Guide to Saving the Oceans One Bite at a Time.” If you see the words “chutoro,” which means from the sides of the belly, or “otoro,” which means the center of the belly, that’s bluefin too.

Bluefin tuna require global cooperation to save them. The fish are truly creatures of the open oceans. Species include Pacific, Atlantic and Southern bluefins. “These are the fighter jets of the sea. They are really highly evolved to be able to swim far and fast,” says Randy Kochevar, a marine biologist at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, which runs the Tuna Research and Conservation Center with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “They are really a global species. They cover a lot of ground.”

In a mere 18 months, one tuna tagged by biologists off the coast of San Diego swam up to Monterey, Calif., back south to San Diego, across the ocean to Japan, back to San Diego, over to Japan again, before it was caught by a fisherman. Their range makes regulating them particularly difficult, as their lifestyle takes them into international waters.

The organization that’s supposed to conserve tuna in the Atlantic is known as the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. It’s an intergovernmental body that recommends how many tuna can be sustainably caught. Theoretically, it should be able to put the brakes on the fishing frenzy in, say, the Mediterranean from May to July, when the fish congregate there to breed. But ICCAT’s recommendations are so corrupted by fishing interests that ecologist Carl Safina, author of “Song for the Blue Ocean,” and president of the Blue Ocean Institute, famously nicknamed the commission the International Conspiracy to Catch All the Tuna. “The tuna commission is a complete failure,” he says.

The last time ICCAT met, in 2008, scientists suggested that the annual take be limited to between 8,000 and 15,000 metric tons. Ignoring the advice of its own scientists, ICCAT proceeded to set the limit at 22,000 tons. What’s more, fishermen are not stopping at the ICCAT recommendations. As recently as 2007, when ICCAT set the quota at 30,000 tons, scientists estimated that closer to 60,000 tons were caught, thanks to unlicensed vessels pirating tuna, and licensed vessels flouting the rules to catch more than their share.

The tuna are taking a hit. “If you take a 1,200-pound fish out of the ocean, it’s going to take a long time to replace that fish,” explains Kochevar. “As you remove the large fish from the population, you’re going to end up with a population that’s smaller in numbers and size.”

Enter the practice of bluefin ranching, where fish are caught and kept alive in ocean pens to be fattened for months until they reach sellable size. That means some of the younger fish are being taken out of circulation before they’re old enough to breed and reproduce, precipitating the decline in the ocean.

There are two distinct populations of Atlantic bluefin. One breeds in the Gulf of Mexico and the other in the Mediterranean. On this side of the Atlantic, fishermen lament that they are catching only a fraction of the tuna they did seven years ago. But according to Safina, they have only themselves to blame. For years the fishing industry fought restrictions on bluefin quotas and now they are facing the consequences. “The opposition is so weakened by their own success,” says Safina. “They got what they want, and now they’re out of business.”

The last few years have brought a flurry of bad news for the big fish of the sea. Some 90 percent of the world’s great fish, including blue marlin and Antarctic cod, have almost disappeared since the 1950s, according to a paper published in Nature in 2003 by Ransom Myers and Boris Worm. By 2048, the world’s supply of seafood will likely simply run out, Worm and other marine biologists warned in the pages of Science in 2006. As of 2008, 80 percent of the world’s fish stocks were considered either vulnerable to collapse or already collapsed.

“This is a new era that we’ve moving into,” says Gerry Leape, senior officer at the PEW Environmental Group. “We globally have assumed that there are always more fish in the sea, and it’s only been in the last decade when the peer-reviewed science has come out to show that’s not true.”

With ICCAT still in the tank for fishing interests, according to Safina, wildlife advocates are turning to international bodies that govern endangered species to save the bluefin. In March 2010, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora [CITES], in which 175 countries participate, will hold its next meeting in Doha, Qatar, and momentum is building to restrict trade of bluefin. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has announced that his country will support banning trade in endangered Atlantic bluefin. Britain and Monaco have indicated that they’ll support the restrictions as well. The U.S. is considering doing so, but is still officially on the fence.

But CITES doesn’t have a great history when it comes to conserving fish. “CITES has had trouble figuring out how to list commercially caught fish species,” explains Leape. “Land animals, you can see and count them. When they get down to X number, of course there is no argument. You need to save the 200 snow leopards which are left.” Those deep, ocean-dwelling fish are harder to count. “You can count zebras, you can count trees, you can estimate numbers of fish,” says Hocevar.

In the 1990s, advocates tried to get CITES to list the west Atlantic bluefin tuna, but failed under pressure from countries that fish for it, trade in it and eat it. In 1992, Sweden proposed curtailing trade in the tuna at CITES, but the effort was squashed by Japan, where the majority of the world’s bluefin tuna is sold, and consumed. “It should have happened in 1992. That’s when it really could have saved the fish,” says Safina, who drafted the proposal to list it then. “Now they’re trying to lock the barn after the horse has been depleted.”

Locked boat barn or not, say conservationists, environmental regulations today can’t seem to keep pace with human appetites. The sushi craze that took off in the 1980s is still going strong, and bluefin tuna remain the pièce de résistance.

While Forman thought the twins should be allowed to die, their doctors struggled to save them. While Ellie lived for only four days, Evan, who endured severe disabilities including the inability to speak or see, died just shy of his eighth birthday.

“This Lovely Life” is Forman’s bracing account of becoming the mother of two super-preemies. Its drama comes not only from the relentless medical challenges that tiny Ellie and Evan faced, but also from Forman’s often conflicted emotions, as she cares for her son through his first tenuous years, navigating myriad medical crises, and becomes his greatest advocate. Yet, she feels angry and frustrated that her daughter and son were not to be among those celebrated “miracle babies” who are born terribly premature, but turn out just fine. Along the way, the book raises difficult questions about the ethics of the infertility business, as well as the rights of the parents of extremely premature children vs. the responsibilities of hospitals that treat them.

I spoke with Forman, 47, who teaches writing at the University of Southern California, by phone from her home, where she lives with her husband, Cliff, and 12-year-old daughter, Josie.

What does being born at 23 weeks gestation mean physically?

The brain is still very immature. The retinas have not developed. The lungs are not fully developed. For the most part, the rest of the fetus is fully developed, but cannot survive primarily because of the lung development. Until the advent of surfactant in the early ’90s, which is used to lubricate the lungs, babies born this early did not survive because their lungs could not provide respiration to the body.

When a baby with immature lungs respires, the lungs stick together. They can inhale, but they can’t exhale. Surfactant essentially greases the lining of the lungs so that there is more plasticity so that they don’t stick together on the inhalation.

Even a decade earlier, there is no chance that the twins would have survived?

No chance.

What was your initial reaction when the twins were born so early?

I thought I was having a miscarriage. I had had absolutely no signs that I detected as being of pre-term labor.

I was an educated person. I thought I had been trained to see the signs and symptoms, and I really knew nothing. The doctors examined me to discover that I was 7 centimeters dilated, which is effectively too far gone to stop the labor.

I was shocked and completely overwhelmed. My husband and my then 3-year-old daughter had come with me. They were there with me in the hospital in the examining room.

I knew that if the babies were to be delivered they would certainly not be able to survive. I had been informed during my pregnancy that 24 weeks was the edge of viability, so to my mind, since we had not yet reached 24 weeks, these babies would not be viable.

I felt that it was important not to intervene [to resuscitate the babies after birth], in that it would be a painful experience for them, and for me and for us as a family. It certainly felt to me that the risks of morbidity and mortality were so high that I didn’t understand why the plan was to intervene.

Why was the hospital policy in conflict with your wishes as the twins’ mother?

What I’ve come to learn is that policies regarding care in cases of extreme prematurity vary from hospital to hospital, and even, from what I’ve been able to determine, from shift to shift.

It can often be the decision of the obstetrician, or the neonatologist on duty, as to what to do in these cases. I have heard from other parents at other hospitals where they had twins born at this gestation, who were actually told that they shouldn’t resuscitate the twins. This indicates to me that there is very little consistency across hospitals at this gestation whether or not to provide care or to withhold it.

You were being told that the twins had to be resuscitated?

I was being told that I had no choice. I was told that the laws of the state of California required resuscitation because the babies would be born with signs of life. I was allowed to labor. I delivered the twins. They were both resuscitated. They were taken to the NICU [neonatal intensive care unit].

They were provided with intensive care, which included artificial ventilation and an enormous amount of drugs which are necessary to keep an infant born this early alive. Within a few days, my daughter had suffered a brain hemorrhage, and the hemorrhage was so severe that — as the doctors put it — the quality of her future life was deemed nil. They then met as a team, and allowed us to remove her from life support, which we did when she was 4 days old.

What were some of your feelings during this time?

I was deathly afraid. I had two very, very sick infants, and I had a 3-year-old who needed me at home. I firmly believed during the delivery that the twins shouldn’t be resuscitated. However, once they were born they were my children, and I began to understand that it was my job to take care of them, and to look out for them, and that if I didn’t love them, who would?

Initially, friends and even some doctors would try to arm you with stories of children who had been born this early, and turned out fine. What was that like for you?

It gave me a kind of hope, and I certainly wanted to believe the stories that they were telling me. I remember commenting to a friend, “Apparently, they can make an artificial womb, and that’s what they’re doing, and when they’re all done growing this baby, he’s going to come out of the hospital, he’s going to be OK, and it doesn’t seem to matter that they were born 16 weeks too early,” which sounds ludicrous. Of course it matters.

I wanted to believe in the stories of positive outcomes, but I also was very aware that we were facing a long road, and tried to prepare myself for being the mother of a child with disabilities.

How did your feelings change as Evan progressed and grew within the hospital setting?

I found myself with surprisingly strong protective instincts. No matter what fear I had initially about what it meant to have a baby born that early, I fell in love with my son, and it was my job to be his mother, and it was my job to learn how to be his mother, whatever those challenges might be.

What advice do you have to other parents of super-preemies?

When your child is born this early, and they’re in the hospital, it’s really not your baby. The baby somehow belongs to the doctors and the team. It’s not up to you to provide the care that that child needs.

But even given the fact that you’re not responsible for that level of care, you can become the advocate who learns and knows everything there is about this situation, and potential difficulties that you may face. I think it’s very important to stare those down, and to learn what they may be, because when you come home you need to be as prepared as possible.

When Evan finally did get out of the hospital, what problems did he face?

My son came home with 15 different diagnoses, and at least half a dozen medications that he required on a regular basis, and referrals to half a dozen specialists. Taking care of him became a full-time job, and I certainly applied myself to those duties with as much diligence as I’ve applied myself to anything in my life.

Did you feel like the risks of extreme prematurity were clear to you before you had the twins?

My husband and I did go through fertility treatments, and the multiple birth was the result of those fertility treatments. I remember in passing the doctor mentioning multiple birth as a potential “risk,” as he put it, but never mentioning prematurity or extreme prematurity as a subsequent risk.

I think that fertility doctors clearly are very focused on providing a successful pregnancy for their patients. And parents who want these children are also very focused on achieving a successful pregnancy. It’s not a story that one wants to hear. I don’t know if someone had told me that this was possible that I would have even been prepared to listen. But it is a reality, and it does happen.

I’m not a statistician, but we’re seeing more fertility treatments, which result in more multiple births. And multiple births carry a much higher risk of prematurity — that’s a fact.

As you were going through the initial months of your son’s life, how did your friends and family react?

It was unpredictable. The people who I thought would be by our side and understand weren’t always the people who were able to know what to do. This experience affects an entire family and circle of friends in ways that you can’t describe, and some friends were very supportive, and some friends were overwhelmed, and really didn’t know how to handle it.

I think that it’s a very challenging experience. I think it’s hard on everyone. It’s hard on family, and it’s hard on friends. I don’t think that people are equipped always to know what to do or say.

What advice do you have family and friends?

I think that the best advice is to maintain contact, and to simply say: “What can I do?” And if the answer is “nothing,” then keep calling and say: “What can I do? Is there anything I can do?”

The hardest part for me during this entire experience when Evan and Ellie were born, during those years of his chronic illness, was just feeling alone. I think it’s really important for parents not to feel alone. So, whatever a family member or friend can do to make that person feel less alone that’s the thing that is going to make the difference. Not the right words.

Is it because you are so consumed with your child’s care that you feel alone? Or, because you didn’t have contact with other parents who were going through the same thing?

I think that it has more to do with the trauma of the experience. I think that anyone who has gone through trauma will say: “I can’t explain this. No one understands this.” It’s just the typical reaction to trauma. The people who make you feel less alone are the people with whom you share that trauma.

Do you think that the parents should have the ultimate say about intervening to save an extremely premature child’s life? Or that hospitals should just be more clear about their policies upfront?

I think that the parents should have the final decision, and I think that that decision needs to be informed by some honest facts about outcome. It’s a terrible decision, but it really has to be for the people who are going to be living with their children, and caring for them for the rest of their lives. Those are the people who have the right to make the decision ultimately.

What do you mean by the honest facts about outcome?

Ninety percent of babies born about Evan and Ellie’s gestational age have permanent disabilities of some kind. I knew that, because I had done my research, and I said that during the delivery, and I think the doctor was trying to convince me that wasn’t true.

A lot of people would not know that, and then hear the stories about the 24-weeker who is just fine, and go home very unprepared. There are a range of permanent disabilities — learning disabilities, blindness — but these are lifelong disabilities, and that is the reality.

What were some of the disabilities that your son had?

My son was blind. He did walk eventually at the age of 5, but he was very obviously developmentally delayed in terms of his walking. He was nonverbal. He did not really eat. He came home with a permanent feeding tube. For several years, we fed him solely through that feeding tube. Eventually he did learn to drink a little, and take a little bit by mouth, but he was never going to eat hamburgers and hot dogs.

He had very low muscle tone, which made it hard for him to achieve any kind of developmental milestones. He didn’t smile until he was 9 months old, which most parents would know is very delayed.

But you came to see not only in these clinical terms, because he was your son, and you could experience his joy as well.

I did. He taught me how to see his life as a real life. I’m grateful that I was able to learn that lesson.

After he was out of the initial extreme crises, do you feel like he had good quality of life?

Absolutely. He was loved. He was cared for. He was happy.

At what point were you able to feel like you weren’t in a constant state of emergency when it came to his health?

Every time he got sick I was in a renewed state of emergency. It was relentless from the time he was born until about the time he was 3 years old.

The first two years were especially difficult. We were seeing doctors all the time, he was sick all the time. He was on medication. He remained on oxygen. We had a lot of medical supplies in the house. My dad came to visit me, and he said: “You’ve got your own little ICU here,” and he was right.

But after about 2 years, gradually we’d find ourselves with a little less to worry about. And by the time he was 3 he was no longer fragile or chronically ill.

How did your son’s condition impact his older sister?

My daughter from the time Evan came home until many years later would want to play these games that I thought were just sort of normal play, and now looking back I see that she was really working a lot out. We would play the patient game. She would hook me up to machines, as she called them, using yarn, and then I would have tubing. And then she would give me shots.

She certainly missed her sister. She thought she was going to have a sister, and she doesn’t. I think also she was afraid. When something like this happens, a child automatically worries that it could happen to them. I did what I could to be present for her, while also being very aware that her life had changed in a significant way, and there was nothing I could do about that.

How did this experience affect your marriage?

My husband and I would find new things to fight about. Like any marriage, we had had our ups and downs, we’re very solid, and we’re still solid, but I think that this experience puts such a strain on a marriage, and there is no avoiding that strain.

Eighty percent of couples with disabled children divorce, and we knew that statistic. We worked hard. We still work hard. And we certainly had to solve problems in our marriage that many people do not have to solve, such as where do we bury our child? Or, I don’t feel like taking him to the 15th doctor’s appointment this week, can you do it? Those kinds of negotiations were certainly far more intense than most people have to make in a marriage, but we’ve made them, and so we’re lucky.

Initially, you blamed yourself for the twins’ extreme prematurity. Why do you think you did that? And how did that change over time?

I think as mothers we feel very omnipotent, and very responsible, as though we’re supposed to somehow make everything go well. And in my case I had not been able to do that, so I felt responsible. A lot of people tried to explain to me that it wasn’t my fault.

But I still felt as thought I should have known, and I should have been able to prevent it. Finally, I understood that I had to stop blaming myself, and accept what happened, and that it wasn’t my responsibility. That is humbling, because the other side of the belief in your omnipotence is the realization that maybe you’re not in charge.

What were your experiences like with doctors who treated your son?

I think that we were left behind by doctors who felt that a normal outcome was a child who could see and talk and walk. And that we did not have that. It took me a long time to understand that there were some doctors who were going to walk away and say: “That one didn’t work out.”

But that there would also be some doctors who would say: “Look at him. Look at what he’s doing. This is amazing,” and feel like that was more important.

What was your son’s life like from ages 3 to 8?

When my son was 3, like most children with disabilities, he entered special education. He went to a very small, public special ed classroom, preschool. He had devoted teachers and therapists who saw him through so many personal challenges.

He had a lot of really big successes. He learned how to walk. He did learn how to feed himself a little bit. He was happy. He loved his friends. He laughed.

Kids in preschool have to stand up and put their little name on the felt board and say: “I’m here.” And he would stand up, and put his name up. Then he had this assistive technology, a button he could push that said, “I’m here.” And he would laugh, and think that was just so great.

How did Evan ultimately die, and why?

On the morning of his death, my son woke up happy and playful. He had been experiencing some discomfort that we weren’t able to really problem solve, because he was nonverbal.

But by noon, he had developed an acute abdominal obstruction, and by 2 the next morning he had died, due to organ failure essentially brought on by this obstruction. It was shocking and tragic and utterly unexpected.

As we later learned, the obstruction actually dated back to the surgery that he had had to place his permanent feeding tube. So, in effect, my son died from complications from his prematurity.

How do you feel you were changed by having the twins?

I think that I understand better now that you can feel more than one way at a time about something. We live in this very either-or culture. Either it’s a miracle or we’re a success, or we’re somehow a failure, and we’re not a miracle.

But in my own experience, I could want not to resuscitate my twins, and I could love them. I could be my son’s mother, and I could understand how to be the parent of a disabled child, and I could feel joy again. For me, it’s just been very eye-opening to see that you can feel both ways, and there is sorrow in the joy. I learned how to hear not loss but life.

———-

Do you have experience raising or caring for a child with a disability? Share your stories on Open Salon – click here for more details.

Let’s just say the Puppy Diaries is a departure for Abramson. “She arrived almost housebroken, a wonderful surprise,” the Times editor writes. “Somehow I had forgotten how much having a new puppy is like having a new baby. It’s not only the made-up games, the hide-and-seek and stuffed animals. There is the special puppy smell, much like the distinctive scent, better than perfume, of a new baby’s head.” Yes, there is a super cute Flickr photostream of the pooch and Abramson, too.

In sum, one of the most powerful women in American journalism is now simultaneously on the news desk and on the chew-toy beat. Cognitive dissonance, anyone? As Salon’s editor-in-chief Joan Walsh tweeted yesterday: “I like Jill Abramson. I love my puppy Sadie. Is it just me, or is the idea of NYT female ME blogging about new puppy off somehow?”

While the New York Times, like every other newspaper, struggles to find a new business model in the digital age, it must be great to have a puppy-loving hit on their hands. And I am certainly sympathetic to the tremendous devotion that pets inspire. Hey, maybe giving readers’ a more intimate view of the lives of the editors who run the Grey Lady suits the new Web-tastic journalism world, too.

Still, what’s next? Times executive editor Bill Keller’s weekly ruminations on the vagaries of his home remodel. Somehow, I highly doubt it.

What do Broadsheet readers think?

The bad baby sitter’s a teenage girl, often dressed inappropriately, who is an unreliable scatterbrain, more interested in doing her nails or texting than the kids. When she’s not glued to the TV, she’s gabbing on the phone all night while eating Mom and Dad out of house and home. Or maybe she’s sneaking her boyfriend in after the kids are asleep, or batting her eyelashes suggestively at Dad on the drive home. The bad baby sitter can be a threat not only to the children left in her care, but also to the very marriage of the parents she’s working for.

But as historian Forman-Brunell’s research reveals, the archetype of the bad baby sitter has more to do with adults’ fears about the changing nature of girlhood today — whether today is in 1945 or 1995 — than it does with the reality of girls caring for younger kids for pay.

Baby-sitting emerged in the 1920s, when a shortage of immigrant domestic workers met a rise in teen consumer culture, which found mothers looking for help and teen girls looking for extra cash. Yet, even then, baby sitters had an ambivalent relationship to the job, which came with low pay, sporadic hours and household duties that went beyond diapering and breaking up scuffles between siblings.

While the role of the baby sitter did offer girls some economic opportunity, responsibility and independence, it also placed them squarely in a traditional role, inside the home. When jobs opened up to girls that offered them the chance to socialize with their peers, even for lowly minimum wage (see: mall food court), they jumped at the chance.

As a teen, Forman-Brunell, 54, who is now a professor of history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, worked as a baby sitter herself. As a mother, she periodically hired sitters to care for her two children, who at 16 and 18 are now old enough to be sitters themselves. But while her son has baby-sat a bit, Forman-Brunell hasn’t actually encouraged her own kids to become sitters. That mirrors the current trend; yes, with the rise of today’s overscheduled tweens and teens, the baby sitter has stopped taking parents’ calls.

I spoke with Forman-Brunell by phone from her summer place in Estes Park, Colo., about what sitting has meant over the decades, and means today.

Has there ever been a golden age of baby sitting?

There really never has. Many parents continue to think that way back when, in the postwar years, girls were affable and also plentiful.

But in fact that was not the case. Back in the 1950s, and even before that, during the war and during the Depression, girls complained about the working conditions and the ways in which they felt they were being treated unfairly by their employers.

I was surprised that some girls even formed baby-sitting unions.

In the years right after the war ends, when the baby boom really begins to soar, parents are desperate for baby sitters. These baby sitters really have developed a sense of themselves as being workers. And they have a sense of what is acceptable to expect of a worker and what isn’t.

In various parts of the country they begin to organize these informal unions. Girls get together to draw up a code in terms of what’s the minimum wage, what can their employers expect of them. Basically identifying the do’s and the don’ts.

The unions don’t last. And one of the reasons is that that kind of worker solidarity, agency and empowerment is something squelched during the 1950s, in light of fears about communism, and replaced by notions of domesticity and femininity.

You document pop culture portrayals of the baby sitter as feckless, irresponsible, barely competent. Why do you think this image of the baby sitter developed?

The emergence of that character is very much informed by a larger critique about teenage girls, and the ways in which teenage girls were developing their own culture, their own identity, and the ways in which adults really feared them. The stereotype that emerges is one that’s created by adults, not by teenagers, and it’s one that casts them in a negative light.

During the war, it has a sexual dimension to it. And of course that resurfaces during the 1960s as the kind of sexy sitter who poses a threat to marital stability by being attractive to the male employer.

But simultaneously there were these images of the boy baby sitters as the Boy Scouts who could really get things done.

Girls, fairly consistently over the course of 80 years or something that we’ve had baby sitters, are identified as being unreliable and irresponsible and indulgent. And boys are consistently seen as being responsible and reliable, and using their intelligence in order to control difficult children.

What are some of the most long-lasting and persistent urban legends about baby sitting?

There are two that are really the most dominant. Both of them emerge sometime in the early 1960s. People who study urban legends have identified them as the Babysitter and the Maniac and Wasted and Basted.

In the Babysitter and the Maniac, the children are upstairs usually asleep, and the baby sitter gets a phone call asking her if she’s checked the children. She gets that phone call three times. After the third time she calls up the police to trace the call. He calls back and they call her to tell her that the man is in the house and that she has to get out of the house immediately. What usually happens is that she runs upstairs and finds the kids have already been murdered.

Because she failed at her duties, and she didn’t check the children?

Exactly. Also, she’s been watching television, which in the 1960s is really seen as her entryway into fantasy life, and doing something that she’s not supposed to be doing, which is not being attentive to the children.

That story gets circulated very widely, from coast to coast during the 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Kids actually contribute to the spread of it at summer camps and they share it as a true story. And finally by the end of the 1970s it gets made into a movie, “When a Stranger Calls,” and doesn’t stop there. There are very recent versions of it that are increasingly more gory and violent, sexually violent, sadistic.

And then there’s an entire subset of horror movies that comes from that. Why is the baby sitter such a common figure in those kind of slasher films?

Slasher films emerge in the 1970s, and it’s during the 1970s that feminism has really expanded and had a significant influence on teenage girls. They’re searching for greater freedom and greater economic empowerment and political and social and cultural empowerment. That’s true for women also, obviously.

And the baby sitter — because she’s a wage earner, she’s leaving home, though of course she’s ambiguously going into somebody else’s home — she becomes an object for anxieties about these profound social changes having to do with women and liberation.

The maniac really turns into this male rage toward the ways in which society is changing. Men are losing their position of authority, and girls and women are gaining. It’s a way to contain girls by getting them frightened.

And in fact it was very successful. These legends, whether they’re spread by word of mouth, or on the screen, lots of girls heard them and then they just stopped baby-sitting. They were too frightened. Or, if they did baby-sit, they talked on the phone the whole time so that the maniac couldn’t call.

The baby-sitting role is interesting because it gives the girl a sense of independence and responsibility, yet at the same time it does so in this very traditional role of caring for children.

Since the 1930s, baby-sitter handbooks and manuals have been really playing that up, trying to appeal to that side of girls that is more interested in being independent. Yet what you see is the real tension within the job itself because girls often feel the exploitation of it, and might feel that they’re being held back or held down.

This is a girl’s job. It is a job that is associated very closely with being a girl. For girls who are increasingly being informed by feminist ideals, they begin to see it as a job that is not desirable.

You document a lot of adult fears about baby sitters being irresponsible and bringing their friends or boyfriends over. But isn’t there also an element of the job that allows girls to snoop in an adult world, like going through the parents’ stuff?

I think that definitely does go on. It’s a question of, does it go on to the extent parents assume or fear it does? Some baby sitters have their boyfriends come over, and some do spend a lot of time talking on the telephone, but it’s a question of proportion.

Certainly, from the baby sitters that I spoke to, male as well as female, I have heard about a certain amount of snooping for erotic literature and that kind of thing. It does provide opportunity to maybe peer into the private lives of adults other than their parents. But my suspicion is that it is far less prevalent than what parents fear to be the case.

What about the issue of the sort of sexual fears on both sides — girls being afraid of the leering, drunk husband making advances in the car on the way home, or the family being threatened by the young girl’s sexuality. What do you see as reality versus myth there?

The line between reality and fantasy is kind of blurry. It was really impossible to count how many baby sitters were in fact having sex with their employers, as opposed to how many parents thought that they were.

However, that said, there are police blotters and court cases that do document the ways in which men are being accused and arrested and tried for molesting and raping baby sitters. Now that’s at the furthest end of that spectrum. The more in between is the innuendo, subtle messages.

There are lots of girls I spoke to who would say, “Well, he drove me home in the car and he talked about his marriage. And I felt uncomfortable but nothing happened. It didn’t go further than that.” And it’s a question of what was his agenda there? If she reacted a certain way would he have gone further or not?

On the other hand, some girls talked about men who would drink and who would strip down to their underwear, and who would push it a lot further than innuendo.

In terms of parents’ expectations and fantasies about girls, I would say women and men probably have very different ones. In the pornographic videos, you increasingly have women who are participating in that fantasy. It’s mothers and fathers participating in that fantasy with the baby sitter. There is always the anticipation and the expectation that the baby sitter will be sexual in some kind of way. And there again, the vast majority of baby-sitting experiences, that’s not a part of what goes on.

Of course, if you read newspapers or watch the evening news, there are examples of girls being accused of various activities. Though, typically, if you look at the headline, it’ll say “Babysitter Molests Child,” and then when you read the story what you generally find out is, it was a male and not a female.

This was interesting. While boys consistently are lauded by experts and educators, recent research on baby sitters who are child abusers show that it is more likely to be a male than a female.

Girls, while they’re seen by popular culture as the most potentially dangerous to children and to family life, in fact they’re the least dangerous. Leslie Margolin has done a number of different studies about baby sitters where he not only looks at adolescents, but also looks at the boyfriends of women who have children, uncles and aunts, grandmothers and grandfathers, and consistently finds that gender is really the controlling factor here.

What about the rise of the super sitter? Because that seems to run counter to the incompetent girl baby sitter image.

During the 1980s, once again the birthrate begins to rise. And at the same time you have teenage girls who are now spending more time doing extracurricular activities, there’s a rise in sports. There’s much greater attention paid to their scholastic and educational opportunities.

Too busy to baby-sit!

They’re too busy to baby-sit. And there’s also an expansion of malls from coast to coast, and so there are job opportunities for teenagers. And so who’s left to take care of this new generation of children being born in the 1980s but pre-adolescent girls?

And so the question is: How do you convince parents to hire pre-adolescents to take care of their babies? To feel confident in them? And then also, how do you get pre-adolescent girls to want to baby-sit, because in many ways they are being influenced by the same social forces that are shaping their older sisters.

So, during this period, an explosion of baby-sitter manuals emerges that are geared largely toward the pre-adolescent girl. They construct her as this super sitter, kind of analogous to the superwoman, you know, the super mother.

The super sitter is this confident, energetic, clever, pint-size businesswoman, who can do anything and can do it very well. Then, there’s also an emergence of educational, vocational safe-sitter programs, offered in hospitals and churches and schools and things like that.

And the age of the sitter which these manuals are aimed at just comes down increasingly because there just aren’t enough sitters.

To what age?

It starts going down to 11 and 12. And it even goes down further than that if you look at the popular culture. That’s where “The Baby-sitters Club,” the book series, comes in. It’s no coincidence that during this period where you have a sitter scarcity, and yet you have enough pre-adolescent girls around, that the “Baby-sitters Club” book series emerges. It really becomes a juggernaut into the next century.

Through these characters girls can imagine they are empowered and independent. In the stories, they’re baby sitters who enter these other domains that would be off-limits to tweens, as they go out into their community in a Nancy Drew-like way, solving mysteries.

It was really a way to groom girls to want to become baby sitters. There again is the double-edged quality to baby-sitting — on the one hand appealing to the girl’s desire to be independent, and yet on the other hand really directing it toward domestic ends.

How has the rise of the modern tween precipitated the fall of baby-sitting as we know it?

The teenage girl is consistently, especially in the ’70s and very much so in the ’80s, seen as a very, very dangerous figure. Like, at the same time you see the “Baby-Sitter Club” confident girl with this business acumen and creativity, the flip side is the teenage murderous baby sitter who appears in all kinds of made-for-TV movies in the 1980s.

Teens are really demonized?

The teens are demonized and where they’re seen as whorish, the pre-adolescent girl is seen as wholesome. The culture not only gets girls to think about themselves in these ways but also gets parents to think of them in that way so they will hire them.

The tween is very much following in the footsteps of her older sister, and so what happens is that the 13-year-old doesn’t have time, or the inclination, and then neither does the 12-year-old, or the 11-year-old. As aspects of girlhood autonomy seep downward into younger girls, they also have less and less of a desire to baby-sit, and also more responsibilities in terms of academic, extracurricular activities.

Do you think parents are just not going out as much now, or are they more reliant on adult baby sitters, or nanny-type of figures?

By the end of the 1990s and then into the new millennium, parents are using a great variety of methods in much the same way that parents had in the 19th century.

They might rely on grandparents. One benefit of being caught up in that sandwich generation is that maybe you do have a grandparent around to watch or at least keep an eye on children.

Sometimes they bring their children with them when they go places. Children have Gameboys, and they have computers, and they have cellphones.

Ah, they have the electronic baby sitter!

Exactly. And so in a way you can take them along shopping and stick ‘em in a corner and they’re perfectly happy with their game. In fact, they’re too happy, right? And with rising divorce rates, you have two different households. So, a wife has more freedom to go out because her children are at her ex-husband’s.

I wonder about the impact the recession has. I know one of my students who is a baby sitter was telling me recently that she doesn’t like to baby-sit any more because the parent will stay home while she’s baby-sitting, using her more like a mother’s helper. The mother or the father will be working in the den on their computer trying to find a job.

So your student doesn’t have the autonomy of the old-fashioned baby sitter?

She doesn’t, and she doesn’t like that. I wonder whether there might be a shift toward that. I mean, obviously in some cases people aren’t hiring  baby sitters because they can’t afford them because they lost their job. But in other cases they might be hiring a baby sitter because that frees them up from childcare so that they can try to pursue job opportunities.