The Feminine Misstatement

This morning I was drinking my tea and catching up on some of my favorite blogs when I came across a couple of posts that gave me pause at another blog. The first, about truth in blogging, originated at Toddled Dredge. The second had to do with an article written back in March by Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake. The article in The Huffington Post is one of the most unhappy examples of strident journalism I’ve encountered this year, and does nothing to inspire me to buy Bennetts’ book.

What bothered me about Bennetts’ article is the disrespect with which she treats her readers, most of whom (presumably) are mothers. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that 46% of the work force today is female, and that almost 60% of all females over the age of 16 are working in some capacity (including part-time, flexible, seasonal, and unpaid work). Most of the women Bennett insults are statistically likely to have been or become part of the labor force and in fact are possibly currently part of it. Any woman who earns income and files a tax return becomes part of the statistic, even if her toddlers are playing nearby as she works. I think that writers like Bennett and those who seek to capitalize on the Mommy Wars ought to keep this in mind.

Even though my mothering experience spans almost 30 years, I’m less inclined than ever to write about working mothers and stay-at-home mothers because of the polarization that occurs. In real life, the choices women make are as different as the women making them. It makes little sense to generalize about issues that are so important and personal.

Still, Bennetts’ article prompted me to write on the topic because the article seems so irresponsible. The statement that tripped the wire, so to speak, was this:

As for the children’s welfare, sociologists have spent decades comparing the kids of working moms with those of full-time homemakers, consistently failing to prove that the latter do better. “The research on the impact of working mothers on kids shows that there isn’t any,” reported sociologist Pamela Stone. And when the kids grow up, the futures of working mothers are usually brighter than those of the homemakers, who often find themselves financially stranded and bereft of viable opportunities for employment.

Setting the issue of economics aside to return to later, I want to address Bennetts’ claim that “the research on the impact of working mothers on kids shows that there isn’t any.” Perhaps this is true in sociological research, although I doubt it; I didn’t have the time to access the sociological research to decide. However, to be fair, I’ve emailed Dr. Stone for her comments. In the meantime, if anyone cares to spend about 20 minutes with Google and the search terms “effects of day care,” and “impact on children of working mothers,” they will soon find exactly what I found: there is research on the impact of working mothers on kids.

I imagine that Bennetts will someday wish that she had been more careful with her statements, because making such a statement causes me to wonder about her intentions. Is she simply stirring the pot so as to stimulate book sales (her book has sold about 42,000 copies so far)? Is she a working mother whose bias is showing? (Yes.) Did she mis-quote Stone? Did the backlash of at-home mothers against her apparent disrespect for their choices unsettle her?

Whatever the case, the question I have is the same one Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” Can the truth about working mothers and children’s responses to substitute care be determined by reading research studies? Will we be able to look at the research objectively, and will the research itself be objective? Will having more facts, if we can agree that they are facts, help us to raise healthier children? And, if we discovered that working mothers were bad for children, would we be able to do anything about it to help our kids? Conversely, if we discovered that working mothers were good for children, would we be able to create more work opportunities for mothers so that as a society we could raise healthier children?

I like what Diane McHale wrote about research on parenting in her Mothering Magazine article:

The value of a study’s results has nothing to do with whether or not they make parents feel bad; what we all really want is the truth about what’s best for our children. The point of research on daycare should never be to reassure us. We have a right to know if there are problems with daycare. We have a right to make our own decisions about working or staying home, and we have a right to base those decisions on factual information about real-world child care.

We do have some factual information about real-world child care and its real-world effects on children. There’s plenty of research into the effects of working mothers on children of various ages; most of it isn’t easy to translate, and most of it is disseminated publicly through sound bytes that do gross injustices to the actual research. This probably makes social scientists gnash their teeth; but not much can be done about it, since we’re all too busy rushing to and fro to sit down, sort it all out, and try to translate it in ways that make sense.

Like most mothers, whether at home or at work, I’m too busy to hash it all out with scientific integrity. However, I can summarize what we do know by using broad generalizations that might fit many children much of the time.For instance, we know that the younger a child is, the more negative the impact of full-time substitute care; the risk is particularly high to infants under the age of nine months. We know that if a child is male, he will suffer more from substitute care. We think that the more hours a mother works during the week, the greater her stress and the greater the negative impact on the child’s educational attainments. We hear that children whose moms work a lot are at greater risk of psychological distress.

Researchers tell us that perhaps half of all working women think that they cannot fulfill their mothering responsibilities if they work full-time, and we know that only 13 percent of working mothers in one study actually wanted to work full-time; the majority wanted to work part-time.

The statistics seem to say that over half of all mothers in the United States are working mothers, but this data includes women who work for family concerns and are unpaid, women who work part-time or only occasionally, and for those who are home with their children but make money on the side. Still, this is a marked change from 1940, when 60 percent of all families had a working father and stay-at-home mother—a picture that describes less than 20 percent of today’s families.

The picture that social science and government researchers seem to paint for us is one in which most women work, and most mothers also work. I think that stay-at-home mothers who actively chose to stay home with their children rather than work at careers know this.

Some of the Research

• Quebec’s universal child care worked very well for parents, but had quite unhappy results for children.
• Day care children were more anxious and aggressive, have more behavior problems, and tend toward obesity.
•  Children younger than one year old are particularly hard hit by separation from their mothers.
• The better the quality of day care, the higher a child’s vocabulary later.
• The more time children spent in day care before age five, the worse their behavior problems later.
• Being in day care does not create orators or criminals in and of itself.
• Over half (54%) of mothers with professional or graduate degrees do not work full time.
• Day care provides many benefits to underprivileged preschoolers.
• Working mothers are more stressed than stay-at-home moms.
• Children of stay-at-home moms may be more clingy than children of working mothers, though.
• Day care may weaken the mother-child bond.

 

Perhaps one of the most interesting studies was the Canadian National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth. They studied 33,000 children age newborn to four years between 1994-2002 (that’s eight years) and reported: 

Several measures we looked at suggest that children were worse off in the years following the introduction of the universal childcare program. We studied a wide range of measures of child well-being, from anxiety and hyperactivity to social and motor skills. For almost every measure, we find that the increased use of childcare was associated with a decrease in their well-being relative to other children. For example, reported fighting and other measures of aggressive behaviour increased substantially. Our results are consistent with evidence from the National Institute of Child Health and Development Early Childcare Research Network (2003), showing that the amount of time through the first 4.5 years of life that a child spends away from his or her mother is a predictor of assertiveness, disobedience, and aggression.

Furthermore, we find that several important measures of well-being show parents to be worse off. The survey data showed that mothers of the children in daycare were more depressed, as indicated by the significant rise in their depression scores relative to the average. The quality of their parenting practices declined, as measured by responses to questions on consistency, hostile or ineffective parenting, and “aversive interactions.” They also reported a significant deterioration in the quality of their relationship with their partners.

Alma Mater

What’s an alma mater to do with all this information? First, I think we might consider the fact that we’re invaluable to our children. Do we really think we can be replaced by a day care worker for $7.50 an hour, or a nanny at an average of $590 a week? And if we know we can’t be replaced, why are we working?

Judging by the evidence, most working women don’t want to work as much as they do. They work because they provide half or more of the household income, and many work because they provide all the income. Also based on the evidence, the more education and privilege a mother had, the more likely she was to leave full-time work, or to leave her career altogether. This suggests that many women work out of necessity, especially when their children are young. It also indicates that even women who can be full-time mothers often choose not to; they want lives of their own, too.

I think the question that responsible mothers are really asking is this: now that I’ve chosen to have children, what responsibility do I have to them? How much mothering is enough? How much mothering is spectacular? How much and what sort of mothering will I need to do to give my child what he really needs, without abandoning myself? What will it mean to be a good-enough mother?

Different mothers will have different answers to such questions. In my opinion, our answers should arise out of the deep well of ourselves–not from the popular culture, from what the parenting experts say, or even from research studies. I hope that mothers will go with what they know in their hearts, and will find the courage and resourcefulness to do what they know is right for their children, their families, and themselves.

Women drinking from that well won’t need any help with the “facts” from Leslie Bennetts; of this I’m sure.

 

Real Resources for Alma Maters Returning to Careers

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