Working mothers

Mothers and Choice

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A primary narrative in family policy in the United States is that parents should have choices. The idea of choice fits neatly within the values central to the founding of the United States—freedom, independence, and individualism. These values assume that people should be responsible for themselves and should “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” In this country we talk about family choice, healthcare choice, and school choice as code words for limited government involvement or small government conservatism, as solidified by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s regarding children. But, as Claire Cain Miller explains in the New York Times, mothers often feel they have no choice at all.

Women are still the primary childcare providers in heterosexual marriages. Three-quarters of mothers are employed, yet the structural problems mothers face are rarely discussed. Instead we talk about work-life balance, but this is not the right conversation. Without attention to the structural issues that mothers face, the choices are difficult ones. For example

  • Very few companies offer paid family leave to all employees
  • Childcare is often unaffordable or difficult to find
  • Mothers are often expected to work long hours
  • Work schedules are often irregular and unpredictable
  • The rising costs of healthcare and housing also limit women’s options

The language of “choice” is misleading because it hides inequalities based on gender, race, and wealth. Miller explains that the concept dates back to the 1980s when women started entering the workforce in large numbers, which implied that women had the choice about whether to stay at home to raise families or to work. While white, married, middle-class women may have had some degree of choice, many women did not and had to work to support their families.

Miller notes that while more women than ever are in the workforce today, they still “feel forced to make painful decisions, like leaving their child in inadequate care, or working in scaled-back jobs they say they wouldn’t have chosen under different circumstances.” The language of individual choice still frames the public policy debate as women are told to “lean in or lean out.”

We need structural solutions. Democratic candidates propose structural solutions such as new federal programs, financed by taxpayers, that would provide paid family leave, subsidized daycare, and free public preschool. Republican proposals offer individual solutions such as letting new parents draw down their social security earnings to help pay for childcare or get tax credits. At this time, the choices women (and men) have for caring for families while working to support those families are very limited. You could say they don’t have choice at all.

Something needs to change.

 

Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash

Women Worry More than Men about Family Chores: Why This Matters

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  • Is he lazy, or not really committed to equality?
  • Is she doing it all so well that he doesn’t feel a need to do more?
  • Are her standards so high that she doesn’t trust him to “do it right” regarding child care?
  • Is she really unwilling to let go of control?
    • What is clear to her is that she is becoming resentful and exhausted. Why is this important? There is the obvious potential damage to her relationship if her resentment continues to grow. There is also a potentially negative impact on her career. In an article in the New York Times, Judith Shulevitz noted that it takes “large reserves of emotional energy to stay on top of” all the details in the management of family life. Shulevitz cited research on heterosexual couples (she noted gay couples as being more egalitarian) from all strata of society that confirms that my friend’s experience is not unusual—women do the larger share of “worry work” about the details of family management. Tracking all these details can actually be a significant distraction for women at work and can scatter our focus, potentially disrupting our careers. Shulevitz speculated that these distractions “may be one of the least movable obstacles to women’s equality in the workplace.” Wow! Think about the possible significance of this statement. What, then, could be our part in keeping this inequality in place? Shulevitz related a story about young women in a recent undergraduate course on women and work who were making presentations at the end of the course. Many of them slipped in their language and talked about the importance of men “helping out” with household tasks and “babysitting” the children. Helping out and babysitting are not the same as sharing responsibility. These slips in language probably reflect traditional societal stereotypes that create pressure for women to be the right kind of mother. These pressures seem to be alive and well in our society, and even young women seem, to some extent, to be internalizing them. I think my friend may be asking the right questions. As women, have we internalized the traditional role expectations for us as women and mothers? If so, are we acting out these expectations by
    • Sending a mixed message to the men in our lives about whether we really want them to do an equal share?
    • Feeling we “should” do more of the household/child-care tasks to be the right kind of mother?
    • Keeping control of the lists because we really like being in control?
    • Being inflexible about our standards for doing family management?
    What is the truth of the matter for you on the questions above? What can you let go of? What has worked for you to equalize the load with your partner?]]>

    Good News for Working Mothers: Busting through Another Myth

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    Journal of Applied Social Psychology, show that the more satisfied a woman is with her employment, or with having a career, the more harshly she is judged by society as a “bad mother.” The underlying assumption of this stereotype seems to be that children will be stunted in their development, or otherwise harmed, if their mother is not home when they are young. Many women report feeling guilty about working when they have children at home, even when they have no choice, because of this stereotype and the societal pressure it represents. A new study by Kathleen McGinn of Harvard busts a big hole in this myth of the good mother. McGinn polled 50,000 adults in 25 nations and found that “women with working mothers earned more and had more powerful jobs than adult daughters whose mothers stayed home when their children were young.” She found that in the United States, “women with working mothers earned 23 percent more than women whose mothers did not work” outside of the home. The good news, then, is that rather than harming their children, working mothers are providing a positive role model to their daughters. Working mothers can also be positive role models for sons, though in a different way. While McGinn’s research showed that having a working mother did not have an impact on men’s earnings, men in the United States who had working mothers “spent almost twice as much time on family and child-care tasks as those from more traditional families.” These men are providing positive role models to both sons and daughters about being equitable partners in the home. This is all good news!]]>