The Mommy Wars

Why feminists and conservatives just don't get modern motherhood.

Cathy Young from the July 2000 issue

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Part-time arrangements are also becoming more common, even in professions where anything less than a 60-hour week was once frowned upon. Jennifer Braceras, a 32-year-old attorney with a major law firm in Boston, has been working a three-day week ever since her older daughter was born two years ago. (In February, she went on maternity leave, on generous terms provided by the firm, after having her second child.) While part-time work is theoretically viewed by the firm as a transition back to full-time work, there is no rigid timetable: Braceras plans to stay on a reduced workload until the children are in college.

"I knew that I didn't want to work full-time after I had children," she says. "For me, the ideal balance was always to have a professional life and time for my children. I need to be with my family more than I'm at work, and this way I'm at work three days a week and at home four days a week, so I'm comfortable with that." Braceras is also comfortable with the knowledge that she is unlikely to become a partner in her law firm. Would any government program have enabled her to achieve parity with colleagues, male and female, who are not on the "mommy track"? No, says Braceras, because she would never have availed herself of any program that would have allowed her to be away from her children more.

To complicate things further, some mothers who are nominally not in the labor force may be giving more time to non-domestic pursuits than some part-time workers. A 1998 New York Times Magazine profile of Elizabeth Munro, a corporate lawyer who had given up her career to raise three children, pointed out that "the '90s-style stay-at-home mother is not even home all that much." Munro was a dedicated amateur athlete as well as a busy volunteer serving on the town planning board--at one time, she had chaired the board, putting in 15 to 20 hours a week--and working with charitable and educational organizations. Not surprisingly, she had paid childcare help.

Men's lives are changing too. Both feminists and conservatives are inclined to dismiss the New Dad as a creature of wishful thinking, but father care is hardly fictional or marginal. According to the Census Bureau, nearly one in four fathers in two-earner families provide childcare while the mother is at work, and nearly one in five are the primary caregivers (which adds up to about 2 million men). With nearly one in three working wives now outearning their husbands, more couples who believe that one parent should remain at home may decide that it should be the father. True "full-time dads" are still rare, and they still labor under a cloud of suspicion that they are slackers; but quite a few fathers avail themselves of broader opportunities to work from home.

One of them is Debra Ross' husband David, a mathematician working in the research department of Eastman Kodak Co., who switched to part-time, home-based work after their daughter was born. Ross stresses that he does not simply "help out" with the baby but is "a full partner" in child-rearing.

Brian Carnell, 31, a freelance writer and Web site designer who also works in data processing for Western Michigan University, has consciously scaled down his career ambitions since the birth of his daughter Emma, now 3, and made family his top priority. His 29-year-old wife Lisa is completing her master's degree in medieval history at WMU, where she also has a half-time secretarial job and team-teaches a course.

One of Carnell's chief goals at present, he says, is to work out an arrangement that would allow him more time at home when they have their next child. This is not part of some politically correct effort to transcend gender roles; in fact, both Brian and Lisa have often battled political correctness, including radical feminism, on campus. But conservative dogma about the nature of motherhood and fatherhood also leaves them cold. "It's really the same argument--there's only one proper way to have a family," says Brian Carnell. "For Al Gore it's spending $5 billion a year on universal preschool. For many conservatives, it's a strict sexual separation of labor: Women take care of the kids, men go out and earn the money. Both forget that few people fit strictly into these molds. I know that if Lisa had stayed home with Emma and I tried to go out and be the traditional breadwinner, the result would have been a disaster. Families really aren't one-size-fits-all."

Biological differences between the sexes may be real enough to ensure that there are always going to be more women who put hands-on child rearing ahead of career ambition (and more men who see breadwinning as the key part of their parental responsibility). But, given individual variability among men and women, it is likely that the proportion of men taking the "daddy track" will rise--and that the marketplace will adjust to this change, just as it has adapted to the presence of working mothers.

Is there any evidence that dual-earner families are bad for children? On the whole, no. A mother's employment, for instance, does not seem to reduce the time school-age children spend interacting with parents, in part because these children get more attention from their fathers. In a large study of 10- to 13-year-olds published in Child Development in 1994, parents in two-income households actually spent more time doing homework with their children. The same year, the Child Trends research group issued a report showing that mothers who work (especially part-time) are more likely than full-time homemakers to volunteer at their children's schools, attend Parent-Teacher Association meetings, and go to class plays or varsity games.

Whether preschool children are at a disadvantage when both parents work remains a hotly contested question in social science as well as public-policy debates, with charges of political bias flying back and forth. There is no question that feminists, childcare advocates, and their supporters in the media are much too quick to seize on any data that can be reported under a headline like "The Kids Are All Right"--such as the Developmental Psychology study mentioned above, or an earlier major study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which received the same enthusiastic treatment on the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Even in these studies, there is evidence that children who spend a lot of time in daycare in their first year of life have somewhat worse relationships with their mothers--at least if the mother had not been very warm and responsive to begin with.

The daycare cheerleaders are also prone to ignore other research that shows a slight but consistent increase in psychological and behavioral problems among children who were in non-maternal care as infants.

But critics are just as likely to err on the side of alarmism and ignore the good news: for instance, that children's cognitive and emotional development is far more affected by the home environment than by daycare. Clearly, what such findings suggest is not that "parents don't matter"--the message conservatives often impute to any report giving non-parental childcare a clean bill of health--but that even when parents aren't there all the time, they still matter a great deal. And, as will often happen, neither side is above playing fast and loose with facts and figures.

Consider the reaction to the Developmental Psychology study that was so widely hailed as an antidote to working-mother guilt. Conservatives correctly cautioned that there were serious problems with applying this study's conclusions to the general population: the data, collected by University of Massachusetts (Amherst) psychologist Elizabeth Harvey, came from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which included a large sample of younger-than-average mothers disproportionately likely to be unmarried, uneducated, and poor.

In a column for Investor's Business Daily, Diane Fisher, the IWF-affiliated psychologist, suggested that maternal employment might have positive effects for children in such circumstances, while married, middle-income mothers would probably do their children more good by staying home. Yet other NLSY-based reports, published in the Journal of Family Issues in 1993 and 1995 by North Carolina State University sociologist Theodore Greenstein, show that middle-class children are less likely to suffer when their mothers work. Greenstein found that, except in the lowest-income groups, children of continuously employed mothers had the fewest behavioral problems--and children of women with good occupational prospects tended to fare worse, socially and academically, if their mothers dropped out of the workforce for an extended period of time.

Ironically, some conservatives have also invoked equally flawed data to make the case against working mothers. In one such diatribe in National Review, Maggie Gallagher cited a 1991 study by Jay Belsky and David Eggebeen that found that 3- and 4-year-olds were more disobedient if their mothers had worked full-time in their first two years. Apart from the fact--unmentioned by Gallagher--that the difference was very slight, the sample in that study was actually less representative than in Harvey's: Nearly two-thirds of the mothers had given birth before the age of 22, and fewer than one in seven had ever attended college.