TBR: If you’ve raised kids…
For today’s book review, I turn to Ann Crittenden’s new book If You’ve Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything: Leadership Begins at Home. I felt bad about having taking a bit of a cheap shot at it a few weeks back, without having actually read it. So I read it.
The good news is that Ann Crittenden has not taken leave of her senses — she’s very well aware that the business world does not currently value the skills developed through parenting. The bad news is that this book is unlikely to convince anyone of the value of parenting experience who isn’t already a believer — even if they read the book, which they won’t. I’m not quite sure who the target audience for this book is, other than weirdos like me who are obsessed with the work-family literature. Maybe stay-at-home parents who are looking for a confidence boost as they consider moving back into the paid workforce? (There’s an appendix discussing how to list skills gained through parenting on a resume.) As of today, it’s somewhere in the 4,000s on the Amazon sales list, which I think is pretty good.
To be honest, I found this book a slow read. Crittenden makes her case with exhaustive quotes and examples, but after a while it felt awfully repetitive. And, to a great degree, it felt like she was attacking a straw-man (straw-woman?) argument — that parenting rots your brain. Except for those awful sleep-deprived mornings, that’s not a claim that anyone I know takes seriously.
RebelDad shared his perspective on this book a few weeks ago, and commented that Crittenden lumps all parents together — those combining paid work and parenting, and those returning to the workforce after time spent exclusively parenting. I think I’d go further than that — while the interviews that Crittenden cites were with both "juggling" and "sequencing" parents, I think the book is really aimed at promoting sequencing.
This makes sense when you think of If you’ve raised kids… as sort of an addendum to Crittenden’s last book, The Price of Motherhood. As throughly documented by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, it’s not just the years out of the labor force that cripple women’s lifetime earnings, it’s the effect of these years on their earnings when they try to return. (The limited evidence suggests that it’s just as bad, or even worse, for men who take time out to parent.) And, as I’ve argued before, it’s crazy that in a potential lifespan of 80 or more years, we shouldn’t be able to focus on parenting for the few years when our children are very young or otherwise needy.
However, I wish that Crittenden hadn’t let her bias in favor of at-home-parents show through so much. There are several passages in the book that made me wince as a working parent, including the one in which Crittenden imagines herself telling her teenage son "I gave all that [a prestigious job at the New York Times] up so that you would have at least one parent at home who would be there for you and make sure you didn’t turn out pathetic!" Ouch! Crittenden also shares a horror story of a poor working mother whose children died in a fire when she left them unattended to go to work, a story of a union leader whose daughter was "still angry about her frequent absences and for a long time remained more deeply attached to her grandmother," a story of a media executive who had to remain on the job at September 11, not knowing whether her son was safe, and the story of a lawyer who became an at-home-mom because her job forced her into an "inauthentic persona." Not exactly the most reassuring reading.
This is particularly unfortunate, because, as Crittenden suggests, if the doors are going to be opened to recognize parenting skills any time soon, it’s probably going to be other parents who open them. And by and large, it’s going to be working parents who are going to be in the position to open them.
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1/14/05: This post is getting a zillion hits via google all of a sudden. I’m assuming this is part of some sort of assignment. Please read my comments about the internet and plagarism on my About page.
