The Mommy Wars

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

Cathy Young from the July 2000 issue

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In other instances, both critics and defenders of working mothers have used the same weak or misreported research to bolster their views. One notorious example is the overhyped doctrine, persuasively debunked in John Bruer's recent book The Myth of the First Three Years, that if a child doesn't get the right kind of mental stimulation before the age of 3, the neural "circuitry" of the brain will fail to develop properly and forever remain impaired. (Crucial brain development does occur in the first three years, but it takes very severe deprivation to stunt normal growth.) Of course, the First Three Years theory was picked up by some--including Hillary Clinton--to argue that the federal government must promote "quality" childcare, and by others to argue that mothers must stay home and devote themselves to tending their children's brains.

Indeed, the lack of "quality" daycare is another pseudo-fact bandied about by both sides. Susan Chira, Hillary Clinton, and other advocates of more government involvement in childcare wring their hands over studies supposedly showing that 80 percent of daycare in the U.S. is woefully inadequate (while simultaneously insisting that children in daycare are doing fine). Gallagher and other champions of full-time motherhood predictably use this as proof that daycare is hazardous to children. But such traditionalists forget to mention that the same research gives the lowest marks to childcare by relatives--the kind that conservatives generally find the least objectionable, and that most parents prefer--and the highest to government-regulated centers.

Is this research accurate? Actually, the studies in question, by the Families and Work Institute and by scholars at the University of Colorado, suffer from the familiar problem of demographically unrepresentative sampling. Most of the relatives and unregulated home-based care providers were poor; nearly half had never earned a high school diploma. It's hardly surprising that the environment they created for their little charges did not meet the standards of child development experts; the children's parents probably wouldn't have fared much better. (Whether the negative assessments reflect middle-class bias or actual bad child- care--or both--is another question.)

On the other hand, when the NICHD looked at a more typical population, it came up with far more positive results: 70 percent to 80 percent of 6-month-olds with working mothers were receiving good or excellent care, and less than five percent were in low-quality daycare. Moreover, care by fathers and grandparents was found to be best, followed by home-based childcare--while daycare centers came in last.

In her 1997 Cato Institute paper "The Advancing Nanny State: Why the Government Should Stay Out of Childcare," Darcy Olsen, now director of education and child policy at Cato, debunks the notion of a childcare crisis in America. Her well-documented conclusions belie panic-mongering left and right. While Hillary Clinton laments in It Takes a Village that our childcare system "looks more like a patchwork quilt than a security blanket," Olsen argues that a heterogeneous childcare market works well, "reflecting the diversity of its buyers." While Danielle Crittenden warns in a 1997 Weekly Standard article that "in the debate over national childcare, the advocates of an expanded government role are tapping into a pulsing vein of parental dread and dissatisfaction," Olsen shows that about nine out of 10 working parents are satisfied with their childcare arrangements.

The clear-cut preference of most working parents for childcare by relatives or in family-like settings is routinely ignored or disparaged by daycare advocates. Conservatives occasionally bring up this fact when they criticize liberal schemes for universal daycare--but somehow forget all about it when they lament that, with so many mothers in the workforce, children are being "warehoused" with uncaring strangers.

No one trusts mother and father to know best. Liberals think parents just don't know enough to understand what's good for their kids. (As Hillary Clinton once put it, "A lot of times they don't know what is quality.") Conservatives think parents are deluding themselves to alleviate their guilt--or, worse yet, that they just don't care enough.

Of course, studies and statistics cannot and do not capture the reality of what happens between parents and children. The reality, as Brian Carnell, the freelance writer and Web designer, recognizes, is that one size does not fit all. Some children have probably benefitted from having a mother at home, while others thrive in dual-career families. Certainly, neglected children whose parents are too busy with their careers are hardly a myth. Such parents deserve to be stigmatized, though some pro-working mother commentators are reluctant to do so. (In A Mother's Place, Susan Chira claims that a woman she knows, who gets home from work just in time to chat with her daughter for about half an hour as the child is drifting off to sleep, still manages to be a wonderful mother.)

But most working mothers and many fathers make plenty of compromises and accommodations to ensure that their children get enough attention and affection. The problem is an either/or mentality, such as radio psychologist Laura Schlessinger growling at a mother-to-be who plans to work from home, "Why don't you just get a pet?" The real issue is not exactly, "Should a mother work or not?" says Debra Ross. It's "What is successful childrearing?"

The habit of treating work and motherhood as an either/or proposition shows up even among conservatives who seem to know better. In her 1997 book The Assault on Parenthood, Dana Mack writes that what she calls New Familism is found less in a return to full-time mothering than in "increasingly inventive ways parents combine work and parenting"--such as telecommuting and tag-team arrangements between fathers and mothers working different shifts. Elsewhere in the book, however, Mack champions the ideal of full-time motherhood, insists on the necessity of sex-based parental roles, and even chides policy analyst William Galston, who is by Mack's admission "a notable defender of the family." Galston's heresy? Taking the view that a modern family policy "must accommodate the `right' of women to participate in the workforce."

There is nothing new about the involvement of mothers in market labor, or about extensive non-parental childcare. In agricultural societies, women were always engaged in economically vital work, with childcare spread among the extended family (the "village" of the African proverb that Hillary Clinton redefines to include social workers and federal bureaucrats). As late as 1920, report Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg in Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (1989), the typical farm wife put in workdays of up to 11 hours, not counting childcare. In the cities, the wives of shopkeepers and artisans were once partners in the family business. Large numbers of working-class mothers worked outside the home, often raising the children of the middle- and upper-classes. Even women who had the means to devote themselves to motherhood resorted to childcare arrangements that would make child psychologists weep. In 18th-century England, the future novelist Jane Austen and her seven siblings--children of an Oxford-educated country vicar--were placed in the care of a peasant family as infants, and remained there until they were about 3 years old.

Obviously, just because certain practices were common in the past doesn't mean they are good. In Enemies of Eros (1989), Maggie Gallagher asserts that before the modern emphasis on the mother-child bond, childhood was a dreary, brutal experience. While she probably overstates the horrors, it is a valid point. On the other hand, it may be no accident that the modern preoccupation with family "dysfunction" and with the psychic injuries parents inflict on children--a trend Mack deplores in The Assault on Parenthood--started when intense parental attachment became the primary vocation of wives and mothers. What's more, even as the equality of the sexes was gaining wider acceptance, women's loss of their role as producers may have diminished their status, as some authors have argued. The more work came to be seen as the fulfillment of human potential, the more participation in the marketplace came to be seen as liberating for women; such attitudes were already on the rise when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963.

Proponents of stay-at-home motherhood such as Danielle Crittenden often deride the idea of jobs as "fulfilling," pointing out that few women (or men) have interesting, meaningful jobs; that women lawyers, for example, are vastly outnumbered by bookkeepers and receptionists. It goes without saying that such occupational distinctions are highly arguable. But there's no question that this attitude is as elitist as the feminist tendency to project the values and motives of upper-middle-class professional women onto all women. In fact, about two-thirds of working mothers in various studies say they enjoy their work. "Women who worked long hours for minimum wage...took pride in their ability to hold down a job," writes researcher Beverly Burris in Social Science Quarterly.

In her Washington Post Magazine story about mothers and work, Tracy Thompson tells the story of Ana Kinney, a hairdresser, the mother of two young children, and a reluctant primary breadwinner since her husband's business venture had folded. Kinney was very upset about spending too little time at home when her younger daughter was born; yet she was not longing simply to go back to the nest. When asked what her ideal life would be like, she had a ready answer: working at the hair salon a couple of days a week and running a bridal consulting business from home. The working-class daughter of Cuban immigrants and a woman unlikely to be swayed by political correctness, she nonetheless told Thompson that she couldn't imagine home and motherhood as a full-time job.

Both feminists and conservatives believe--obviously, from very different perspectives--that the large-scale entry of women into the marketplace inevitably leads to pressures for expanded government services. But despite the rhetoric of politicians, there has been little such pressure at the grass roots, to the chagrin of the Hillary Clintons and the Betty Friedans. Instead of demanding government-run daycare, many working parents are circumventing the government altogether by relying on unlicensed caregivers, or even knowingly placing children with home-care providers who violate certain regulations (such as limits on the number of children who can be in the home at one time) but whom they personally trust.