Half Changed World

Tertia writes about her impending return to work.  She notes that the economics of the SAHM/WOHM choice plays out very differently in South Africa than in the US; because domestic help is so cheap there, it almost never makes financial sense for a middle class parent to stay at home.

Bitch, PhD writes about the economic risks of staying home, especially in the case of divorce.  As she notes, these were among the rallying cries of second-wave feminism; she wonders why more women don’t worry about them these days.

The New York Times had an article Thursday on the disappearance of families with children from otherwise thriving urban areas.

This topic certainly resonates around the blogs I read, from 11d to finslippy.  Lots of people have either moved out of cities or are struggling with the decision.  Between the cost of housing, and the low quality of many urban school systems, many sworn city-dwellers start to hear the call of the surbubs after a kid or two.

Res Ipsa wonders "is it necessarily a problem if there are neighborhoods or communities where there aren’t a lot of children?"

It certainly matters to those of us who value city living and who have kids.  I know I feel a stab of pain every time I see a family with young kids moving out of our neigbhorhood.  Their moving is one less family to advocate for the quality of the schools, one less family using the playgrounds and keeping them safe and clean, one less family with which my kids can spontaneously play. 

If you think (as I do) that our dependence on gasoline is a threat to both the world environment and to our national security, anything that forces people into suburban sprawl is a bad thing.

I also think it’s probably better for the education of poor kids in urban school systems when there are also middle-class kids in the same school systems, even if they rarely attend the same schools.  Having middle-class kids in the system brings both attention and money.  Affluent childless singles and empty-nesters may pay income and property taxes, but they tend to ignore the schools and — if anything — fight for lower tax rates.

It seems to be my turn to be sick, so I don’t have the energy to write anything coherent tonight. And I owe people responses to their thoughtful comments on some recent posts.

So, I’m just sharing some resources tonight:

1)  Via the Sloan Work and Family Research Network at Boston College, I learned that the November issue of the ANNALS of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science, on "Mommies and Daddies on the Fast Track", edited by Jerry Jacobs and Janice Fanning Madden, is available for free until the end of March.

It looks like there are a lot of interesting articles there, including:

The Long Road to the Fast Track: Career and Family, By Claudia Goldin
Family-Friendly Workplace Reform: Prospects for Change, By Amy L. Wax
Fast-Track Women and the "Choice" to Stay Home, By Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy
Marriage and Baby Blues: Redefining Gender Equity in the Academy, By Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden
Overworked Faculty: Job Stresses and Family Demands, By Jerry A. Jacobs and Sarah E. Winslow
The Mommy Track and Partnership: Temporary Delay or Dead End?, By Mary C. Noonan and Mary E. Corcoran
Mothers in Finance: Surviving and Thriving, By Mary Blair-Loy and Amy S. Wharton
The Evolution of Gender and Motherhood in Contemporary Medicine, By Ann Boulis
Mommies and Daddies on the Fast Track in Other Wealthy Nations, By Gwen Moore
Elite Careers and Family Commitment: It’s (Still) about Gender, By Scott Coltrane
Where We Are Now and Future Possibilities, By Joyce P. Jacobsen
Policy Alternatives for Solving Work-Family Conflict, By Heidi Hartmann
The Contemporary Myth of Choice, By Rosanna Hertz

2)  Next Friday, the Center on Law and Social Policy is having an audioconference featuring Kathy Edin, co-author of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage.  Edin’s last book, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work dramatically changed the dialogue about welfare, forcing lots of liberals to acknowlege that many welfare recipients were in fact working but not reporting their earnings, and conservatives to acknowledge that it’s all but impossible to live on welfare benefits.  I’m very interested in hearing what she has to say about her new book.

3) Someone I know through an email list is helping put together a panel that will address gender equity in Math/Science for the NY United Federation of Teachers. The panel is May 21 and the conference is in Manhattan (NYC).  They are looking for a couple of speakers/panelists who are in science/medicine/engineering who are esp. willing to address the infamous Larry Summers comments re: women in science, and can pay for expenses.  If you’re interested, email me and I’ll pass your message on.

Via Ms. Musings, I read about WHEN (Women Helping Empower Neighborhoods), a Pittsfield, MA group that helps women get involved in politics.  I was particularly intrigued to learn that part of the support it provides is things like driving kids to classes and providing cooked meals to free up time for the candidates.  This makes a lot of sense to me; family responsibilities are clearly one of the reasons that there aren’t a lot of women in their 30s running for office.

The article reminded me of Mark Schmitt’s comments about Zephyr Teachout’s argument that people are hungering for connection — not just on line, but in person, possibly over drinks, and that groups like the DNC and the ACLU should provide such opportunities as a way to get people involved.  Schmitt’s response is that while such meetings might be appealing to some people (young singles he thinks), the last thing he needs in his busy life is more meetings.

I thought that was an interesting exchange, because I agree with both of them.  I’m aching for community, and the opportunity to feel like I’m part of a movement, not just wandering around in the wilderness on my own.  But I also don’t have time for lots of meetings.  (I think I’m about to drop out of my local Democratic committee, because the meetings are neither pleasurable nor make me feel like I’m making a difference.) 

One way to reconcile these competing needs would be to make the meetings more family-friendly. A newspaper article on WHEN describes its meetings:

Monthly meetings also do not resemble traditional political gatherings.  Meetings last for precisely one hour to make the time manageable for mothers, and children are always welcome. Mattson-Brown laughed when she recalled making one presentation with her 2-year-old son holding onto her leg the entire time.

Another approach is that taken by the Mainstreet Moms Operation Blue (MMOB; formerly Mainstreet Moms Opposing Bush).  They encourage you to get together with the people you already know, and to activate those networks for political ends.  During the election season, they provided all the information you needed to organize house parties to write letters encouraging other moms to register and vote — including addresses. 

Via 11d, I read "Jane Galt’s" take on the Mommy Madness articles.  As you might guess from her pseudonym, Jane is pretty negative about the idea of government intervention to address any of the problems that Warner mentions.  But then she writes:

"The economic pressure affecting middle class families seem to me to come largely from seeking scarce resources for their children: housing in good, safe school districts, and a good college education."

I think that’s basically right — and that’s also what Warren and Tyagi argue in The Two-Income Trap (discussed here).  It’s easy to make fun of moms who are so obsessed about their kids that they stay up all night hand-painting paper plates for a preschool party.  It’s not so easy to make fun of parents who line up at 4 am for a shot at a charter school to get their kids out of DC’s failing public schools. 

Galt argues that no amount of government redistribution is going to change the fact that the people with the most money (and power) are likely to win out when it comes to a bidding war over scarce resources.  Fair enough.  But she accepts as a given that decent, safe schools are a scarce resource.  And I don’t. 

Dang, Judith Warner must have a good publicist.  She has no less than three different articles out in major publications, all based on her new book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.

Her Valentine’s Day op-ed in the New York Times asks "Is our national romance with our children sucking the emotional life out of our marriages?"  She concludes that it is, and urges readers to stop making construction paper cards for their children’s classmates and to go on a real date with their spouses.  While she’s at it, she blames the family bed and extended co-sleeping for a decline in physical intimacy.

The second story is the cover article in Newsweek, entitled Mommy Madness.  In this Warner describes a generation of miserable mothers, driven to desperation by their own high expectations and lack of societal support:

"Life was hard. It was stressful. It was expensive. Jobs—and children—were demanding. And the ambitious form of motherhood most of us wanted to practice was utterly incompatible with any kind of outside work, or friendship, or life, generally." 

Warner then tries to tie this in to an argument that we need societal supports for parenting — tax incentives to promote family-friendly work, high quality day care for both full-time working parents and as occasional relief for at-home parents, more opportunities for part-time work.  I generally think these are good things, but it’s not clear how they’re going to solve the problems of the women featured in the article, who can’t sleep at night because they’re worried about the preschool party they’re organizing.  What they need is to get a grip. 

As Jody at Raising WEG points out, this cult of the hyper-parent is very much a middle-class privilege, and far from the universal state.  Most parents are plenty busy just from doing the basics — earning a living, keeping their kids clean and fed and the homework done — not from participating in a million afterschool activities or distressing store-bought pies to look homemade.

As I see it, the middle-class stress of extreme parenting is driven by several factors:

First, as Warner correctly points out, there’s been a decay of the parenting "commons."   Organized sports with registration, and schedules and fees have replaced pick-up games.  You can’t count on the local public school being good unless you deliberately pick a place to live based on the schools. 

Second, as being an at-home parent has become a deliberate choice rather than the default position, some at-home parents feel the need to justify their decision by giving their kids every bit of attention and stimulation possible.  This is how they prove that they’re not wasting their expensive educations.

Third, some working parents feel the need to justify their decision by making sure their kids aren’t suffering at all from their absence.  They try to cram as much attention and activities into the weekends and evenings as an at-home parent might do all week, and give up sleep instead. 

And finally, as Laura points out, there’s a natural tendency to measure what’s appropriate by looking at the people around you.  Moreover, the standard of comparison is usually the "best" of those around you, not the average.  So it just takes one family having a magician at their kid’s party for everyone in their social circle to start wondering whether they should be having a puppet show.  And the expectations creep up as each family joins in. (My personal act of resistance against this madness is to respond "YOU DON’T NEED A GOODY BAG" every time someone posts on the DC Urban Moms list asking what items are good for a goody bag for a 3-year-olds party.)

Third article is from Elle, and it mostly emphasizes the differences between American and French attitudes towards parenting.  It’s by far the most interesting of the three articles, making the point that the whole culture of intense parenting is a uniquely American phenomenon.  Warner concludes that the problem is an ideology that is so widespread that it’s hardly ever questioned:

"[It] tell us that we are the luckiest women in the world, with the most wealth, the most choices. It says we have the know-how to make “informed decisions” that will guarantee our children’s success. It tells us that if we choose badly, our children will fall prey to countless dangers—from insecure attachment to drugs to a third-rate college. And if our children do stray from the right path, we’ll have no one but ourselves to blame. To point fingers at society is to shirk “personal responsibility.”"

I’m intrigued enough to put Warner’s book on hold at the library.  I’ll report back when I’ve read it.  I’m wondering if there’s not an overlap with some of the arguments that Schwartz makes in The Paradox of Choice.

Via a chain of blogs, I found this flash photo-essay of "a day in the life of moms working at Mothering." (For those of you with slow connections, it’s a series of pictures of babies and children in the office, some being held on mommy’s lap while she types or talks, some playing on the floor, etc.)

Demi at Pilgrim’s Progress comments "There is no reason whatsoever to think that every office couldn’t look something like that."

The pictures are awfully cute, but I wouldn’t want to have to do my job while caring for small children at the same time.  My experience with working from home, while caring for children at the same time, is that I always felt like I was doing an inadequate job at both parenting and my paid job, with neither getting my full attention.  And I was totally frazzled, with never the opportunity to drink a cup of tea in peace — if it was naptime, I had to jump to get down to work.  Add to that a less than entirely childproofed office, and it sounds like a total nightmare.

I definitely could imagine this working with a tiny infant, especially one who slept a lot, or who was content hanging out in a sling.  It’s a lot harder for me to imagine bringing my toddler, whose favorite activities these days include: pulling things off shelves, taking things out of trash cans, putting things in trash cans, putting things in his mouth, and pulling on cords to see what happens.  Or rather, it’s far too easy for me to imagine what would result.  I could probably bring my preschooler to work in an emergency, but I’d have to let him use my computer all day (or bring in the portable DVD player) if I wanted to keep him out of trouble.

The discussion of this in the comments at Alas, A Blog also raise the question of whether this would be fair to other workers, as well as pointing out that not everyone works in an office.  They’re worth reading.

Does anyone reading this get Mothering?  The movie seems to go with the current issue, which features a cover story about bringing babies to the office, but it’s not available online.  I’d be interested in hearing whether the story is all about the positives (not forcing people to choose between work and time with their kids) or if it discusses the negatives as well.

Twelve years ago, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was signed into law.  It was the first bill signed by President Clinton, as it had been repeatedly passed by Congress, but vetoed by Presidents Reagan and Bush.  It’s not perfect — the leave is unpaid, which means that it’s of limited use to the most vulnerable families, and it only covers about 60 percent of the workforce, because small companies are excluded — but it’s a lot better than nothing.

Today, there are widespread rumors that the Family and Medical Leave Act is under attack.  While nothing official has been released, the rumors are that the Department of Labor is considering making regulatory changes that would severely undercut the protections of FMLA.  There are two changes that are commonly mentioned:

• Limit the protection to illnesses that require more than 10 days of leave (up from the 3 in current regs).  This would mean that if you had to miss 4 days of work because of surgery or a child’s asthma flare-up, you could be fired.  Those of us at the upper end of the income scale would probably still be ok, because we could "shop around" until we found a doctor who was willing to say we needed the full two weeks off, but those without such resources — or who can’t afford to be without a paycheck for that long — would be screwed.  This seems like a bad idea for employers too, as it would create a perverse incentive for people not to go back to work as soon as they were able.
• Require that employees take FMLA-protected leave no less than half a day at a time.  This one would hurt anyone with an condition that requires ongoing care which doesn’t take that much time.  For example, prenatal care.  During my pregnancies, I always tried to schedule my appointments for the beginning or end of the day, so as to minimize the amount of leave that I had to use.  (This was both a courtesy to my boss, and personally necessary, because your accumulated leave is the only paid maternity leave you get as a federal employee.)  If this rule were in place, an employer could have required me to take 4 hours of leave for each appointment.  Someone with an even slightly less than routine pregnancy could easily burn through 2 or more weeks of her FMLA before the baby was even born.

If these changes worry you, please act now.  If the Department of Labor gets a clear message that people care about family and medical leave, and will oppose the proposed changes, they may well back off before they start the formal rulemaking process.

• Write Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.  Her address is:

Elaine Chao
U.S. Department of Labor
200 Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20210

• Write your Senators and Representative.  Even though the proposed changes are regulatory, not legislative, your elected officials can put pressure on the Department of Labor if they hear that this is a big deal to their constituents.  While you’re at it, you might ask them to cosponsor the Healthy Families Act, which would guarantee workers 7 days of paid sick leave.
• If you are a business owner who supports FMLA, your voice is especially needed.  The Administration is going to claim that these changes are business-friendly.  If you think that these changes are bad policy, if you think they’ll encourage employees to take more leave than they need, if you’ve managed fine under the current system, please speak up.   Write Chao, write your elected officials, but also write the Chamber of Commerce and similar organizations and tell them your story.
• Spread the word.  If you have a blog, write about this. Tell your friends, your coworkers.  Bring sample letters to your playgroup, your moms night out, your weekly basketball game.  This issue is especially important for parents, but it affects everyone — even if you don’t have kids, you can get sick yourself, or have to care for a sick parent or other family member.  You shouldn’t lose your job as a result.

For more information on this issue, see the AFL-CIO working women’s department or the National Partnership for Women and Children.

Update:  The National Partnership now has an Action Alert available that you can use to send emails to Congress and the Department of Labor with a push of a button. 

Fred at Stone Court points out a post by Richard Posner about Larry Summers’ comments about women in the sciences.

The sentence of Posner’s that Fred objects to is "Women who want to have children, as most do, must expect to devote more time to child care that men do."

Fred correctly points out that except for pregnancy itself and breastfeeding, there is nothing a woman can do that a man can’t.  Posner has taken an unwarranted leap from the division of labor in the world as it is to talking about the way things "must" be.

Reverse-traditional families — those where the wife is the primary bread earner and the husband is the primary caretaker — exemplify Fred’s point.  My husband can change a diaper, read a story, and care for a sick child as well as I can, and there are some things that he can clearly do better than me (making up songs on the fly is one of his special talents).

And yet… 

I spend the vast majority of my non-work hours with my children (squeezing in blogging and domestic chores in the few hours between when they go to bed and when I crash myself).  I work pretty much a standard 9-5:30 schedule, and at this point in my life, am generally not interested in jobs that would require 60 or 80 hour weeks on a regular basis.  And this is true of all but two or three of the other women I know (online and in person) in reverse traditional families.

Joan Williams argued in a Washington Post op-ed a while back that this is part of a general trend.  When mothers stay home, their husbands typically work longer hours and are less involved with childrearing.  (The causality in this statement is unclear — you could argue with equal plausiblity that women with spouses who work crazy hours are more likely to feel that their children need an at-home parent, that sole earners need to work more hours in order to maintain a standard of living, or that traditional families believe that child care is a woman’s responsiblity.)

However, Williams claims that:

"employed mothers typically are less willing to consign all child care to the stay-at-home spouse. So children in families with stay-at-home fathers may well receive more parental attention than children in households with stay-at-home mothers."

So, while it’s certainly true that mothers can delegate enough childrearing responsibilities to spouses, other family members, or paid help in order to free up 80 hours a week for work, it’s also clearly true that there are very few mothers who are willing to do so.  We could debate from here until the next century whether the reasons that women and men make different choices in this regard — on average — is biological or cultural and still not come to a resolution, but I honestly don’t think it matters. 

I do think parents who work these kinds of hours — both men and women — are missing out on something. What they achieve instead may or may not be worth it; I’ll always support the right of both women and men to make that choice for themselves.  (FYI, for a fictional look at this issue, the protagonist of Life, which I discussed here, is a research scientist with a SAHD spouse; she works very long hours, and her family life suffers, but she makes a major discovery.)

An important empirical question for this discussion is whether the choice between professional achievement and having a life is inherent in the nature of some kinds of work, or is primarily a result of the way we as a society have structured these jobs.  There’s been some great discussion of these issues over at GeekyMom and Mother in Chief; I’m not sure I have much to add.  There are almost certainly cases of both — I don’t think you could be White House Chief of Staff and not expect to spend 100 hours a week working, but I don’t see why on a case where there’s already 30 different people working on it, you can’t sometimes have two lawyers working 40 hours each instead of one working 80.

In a few hours, my husband should be back home.  He’s been on an out-of-town trip since Thursday morning, the longest he’s been away from the boys since they were born, and we’ve all missed him.  (I also have to admit that the house was a mess until I realized this afternoon how much of a stereotype it would for the primary caregiver to go away for a few days and come back to a disaster zone.)

My mother came down for a couple of days so that I wouldn’t have to take Thursday and Friday off from work, which was very sweet of her.  However, she doesn’t drive, so when he started complaining that his stomach hurt at preschool, I had to cut out in order to pick him up and bring him home.  It was a reminder of how much having an at-home spouse insulates me from that kind of hassle most of the time.  While I share many experiences with working moms in two-income families, there are also some important differences, and that’s one of the big ones. 

Jen at BuddhaMama had a nice post last week about some of the commonalities she found among women who are the wage earners in reverse traditional families.  Her summary sounds about right to me, although my family differs in a few respects (we earned about the same amount pre-children; he doesn’t go as thoroughly off child-duty evenings and weekends as many SAHDs; I write the checks for our household bills).  The only singificant addition I’d make to her list is the sense of responsibility/stress from being the only wage-earner.

In thinking about the ways in which my experiences are similar to, and different from, other groups of working parents, I realized that part of why I loved the recent article about GenX fathers from the Boston Globe is that I saw a lot of myself in these committed dads.  These fathers take their parenting responsibilities seriously and limit the ways in which they allow work to encroach on family — but they also take it for granted that they are going to work.  There’s none of the angst or defensiveness that are recurrent themes in most media coverage of working mothers.