posted October 19, 2007 07:44 AM         

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In Praise Of Stay-At-Home Moms
NRO: Defending The Stay-At-Home Mom

WASHINGTON, March 24, 2005

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Career Moms At Home
Many successful women are choossing to quit their jobs to stay at home and raise their children. 60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl has a preview of her story.

(National Review Online) This column from the National Review Online was written by Myrna Blyth.
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Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Wonder Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes, by Mary Eberstadt (Sentinel, 288 pp., $25.95)

It's one of history's oldest questions: "What's a mother to do?" And, in this provocative new book, Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution offers a simple and straightforward answer: stay home with the children. She has concluded that most of the problems of today's youngsters -- from biting toddlers to depressed middle-schoolers to out-of-control teenagers -- can be blamed on out-of-the-house moms and absentee dads. "Divorce and dual income, dual income and divorce," she writes. "The refrain hums like a mantra through the literature" of dysfunctional youth.

When a female author writes a book criticizing mothers for not being focused enough on their children -- and, perhaps, being too focused on their careers —she must explain how she herself managed to accomplish her writing without shortchanging her brood. In her introduction, Eberstadt does so, at considerable length:

I am an at-home mother of four whose "fieldwork" consists mostly of fifteen years or so spent around sandboxes, schools, carpools, baseball games, and the like and whose intellectual work is conducted by fits and starts and at odd hours in the basement, one wall over from the washing machine and another removed from the Nintendo set-up. I haven't had a "real" office in more than twelve years. Until very recently motherhood also meant that I did very little writing apart from the occasional essay or review.

Today things are different. Three of my children are at school all day long and the youngest is on the verge of it, so there is more time for reading and writing than there has been for most of the last fifteen years. I have a part-time paid baby sitter who is upstairs while I am down, a husband who often works at home, and older children who also help with the youngest one. Thus the "how" of the book.

Oh, dear. Would any father, even the most devoted, writing a book about America's children ever have to explain his work habits so exhaustively? The fact that Eberstadt is so compelled confirms how intense the decades-old moms-at-home-vs.-moms-at-work debate remains -- and how controversial Eberstadt's challenging book could turn out to be. Sheila Wellington, former head of Catalyst, an organization that supports professional women, and now a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, told me, "I still spend much of my time talking about the work-and-home balance. That's what my female MBA students still want to hear about."

Yet Eberstadt's focus, she makes clear, is not on mothers and how their career choices affect them, but rather on how these choices affect their children. The book is not about the search for balance by today's women -- a subject we read about ad nauseam in women's magazines -- but rather about how lonely, unsupervised, and unbalanced millions of our children's lives have become. Eberstadt says the goal of her book is to "put children and adolescents front and center [and] to ask what the empirical and extra-empirical record shows so far about this relatively new and unknown world in which many parents, children, and siblings spend many or most of their waking hours apart."

If you are a working mom and don't want to feel guilty, stop now. Eberstadt is very effective in making her case that as "more and more children have spent considerably less time in the company of their parents... the fundamental measures of their well being" have scandalously declined. For example, in the first anecdote in the book's first chapter -- about day care, which children now attend while still in their diapers -- she sympathetically describes a sick toddler, who should be home in bed, spending all day at a daycare center plaintively calling for his mommy. Child-care workers report that parents who are unable or unwilling to miss a day at work often dose such youngsters with Tylenol to bring down their fevers before dropping them off at day care. Eberstadt also describes angry two- and three-year-olds who act out their aggression, and wonders about the mental state of "babies and toddlers who take up biting as a habit."

The author notes the callousness of some of day care's defenders, such as feminist writers Susan Faludi and Susan Chira, who acknowledge that very small children may get sick more often because of the time they spend away from home but contend that they "are hardier when they are older." Eberstadt comments that "the real trouble with day care is twofold... It increases the likelihood that kids will be unhappy, and the chronic rationalization of that unhappiness renders adults less sensitive to children's needs." Point taken.

Eberstadt documents other harmful effects of today's parents' lack of involvement in their children's well-being. In her chapter on "Why Dick and Jane Are Fat," she maintains it is not the oversized portions, the increase of sweets in our diets, or the lack of exercise that is to blame for our supersized kids: "Today's child fat problem is largely the result of adults not being there to supervise what kids eat." That may be a considerable oversimplification, but one cringes with guilt when she cites some telling examples of how missing parents bribe kids with food: "Mom won't be there for dinner so why don't you treat yourself to pizza and those horrible cinnamon things you like." Or "Sorry I missed your game/play/assembly this morning. How about an ice cream to celebrate?" I doubt there is a working mother who hasn't tried that maneuver.

Eberstadt is also provocative on a subject she has written about knowledgeably before: the overmedicating of our troubled or, should we say, troublesome children, whom harried or self-involved parents just can't handle. In recent years there has been an explosion in the number of children diagnosed with an alphabet of ailments such as ADD or ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) and other "conduct" disorders such as ODD (oppositional defiant disorder), SAD (separation anxiety disorder), and OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" to describe how social pressures were leading to the redefinition -- the normalization -- of behavior once seen as pathological. "In the case of the juvenile mental problems," Eberstadt writes, we are doing the opposite: "We are defining deviancy up so that children who would have been considered normal a quarter century ago are now judged to have intrinsic 'brain problems' and are treated accordingly."

Because of this, our children are being dosed with behavior-modifying drugs at a startling rate. Friends have told me that in some private schools in Manhattan, more than half the children receive their daily meds at lunchtime from the school nurse. Over the past decade the production of Ritalin, the most frequently prescribed of these drugs, has increased 700 percent. In fact, the drug's manufacturer created a seven-inch Mr. Potato Head look-alike toy called "Ritalin Man" to "help the medicine go down," a marketing ploy that should make us all cringe.

Yet Eberstadt claims that she doesn't want her book to make parents feel guilty, not exactly. "The purpose of these pages is not to ask what any one woman or man has decided to do. It is rather to ask what the accumulation of many millions of such decisions is doing to the children and adolescents of this society." Her hope is "to replace our current low moral bar regarding nurture with a more humane standard acknowledging that individuals and society would be better off if more parents spent more time with children."

That may indeed be happening, and not merely because mothers are once more becoming appropriately dutiful. I hope Eberstadt watched and was cheered by a recent 60 Minutes segment, reported by Lesley Stahl, which featured a group of highly educated women who had chosen to stay home full-time with their children. Their choice made a feminist who was interviewed during the segment furious, and seemed, to some degree, to confuse Stahl, a working-woman icon. But the mothers were sensible and tough-minded about what they had lost by making this choice and what they had gained. They didn't want their kids home alone, most of all because they wanted to be with them. They recognized the benefit not only for their children but for themselves. It is an argument Eberstadt never makes but one that would surely enhance her important, thought-provoking book.

posted October 19, 2007 07:45 AM         

Back in the 1980s, when conservative social critics suggested it was better for the mothers of young children to stay home (instead of consigning them to day-care gulags), feminists were furious.

“How dare you tell women what to do!” they screeched. “The nerve – trying to tell us how to live our lives!”

So, guess who’s now telling women how to live, and excoriating them for thinking independently? Feminists. Beneath a veneer of empowerment, the movement has always been fascistic. It’s instructive to see the sisters goose-stepping out of the totalitarian closet, truncheons raised to smash errant skulls.

Leading the charge is Linda Hirshman, lawyer, professor and scourge of stay-at-home moms.

Recently, ABC’s “Good Morning America” (which my friends at the Media Research Center call “Good Morning Morons”) showcased Hirshman’s rant on two consecutive shows, in segments titled “Mommy Wars: To Work or Stay at Home?” and “How to Raise Kids: Stay Home or Go to Work?”

Typical of what passes for balance on the networks, “Good Morning America” afforded roughly 80% of each segment to Hirshman’s views. Dissenters got nodding notice to maintain the pretence of fairness.

Hirshman has attained celebrity status by alerting us to the under-reported crisis of our time – Despite decades of feminist indoctrination (delivered from the classroom to entertainment television – where what used to be called housewives are practically nonexistent) – women are actually choosing to stay at home and nurture their children. Global terrorism, global warming – kids’ stuff, by comparison.

ABC cited census data showing 54% of mothers with a graduate or professional degree no longer work full-time. This is bolstered by Hirshman’s own study of 30 women whose wedding announcements appeared in The New York Times in 2003 and 2004. Only 5 are now working full-time outside the home. Ten work part time. The rest lead lives unsatisfactory to Hirshman and her allies.

Feminists are threatened by this phenomenon. It’s ideology -- and not the interests of women, individually or collectively -- that drives them.

Hirshman’s position: Stay-at-home moms are leading impoverished lives, wasting their educations, short-changing their children (who miss the joys of being raised by total strangers who are paid to care about them) and doing incalculable damage to the cause of women’s rights.

“I think it’s a terrible mistake for these highly educated and capable women to make that choice (choosing children and home over career), Hirshman declares. “I am saying an educated, competent adult’s place is in the office.” Yes, I think we got that.

The Ms. Magazine Poster Person isn’t buying the argument that raising the next generation is in any way, shape or form fulfilling. “I would like to see a description of their daily lives that substantiates that,” Hirshman harrumphs. “Their description of their lives does not sound particularly interesting or fulfilling for a complicated person, for a complicated, educated person,” she adds.

What Hirshman means is: “I don’t find their lives particularly interesting or fulfilling – and my judgment is the measure of all things.” And to think, feminists have been accused of elitism.

Hirshman belittles those women who believe there’s no substitute for mom. She pushes a proposition absurd on its face – that there is no difference in the “happiness levels” of children consigned to the Joyful Tots Detention Center, versus those raised at home.

In the first place, only someone with a PhD. (a complicated, educated idiot) thinks happiness levels can be measured. And what about the disease and abuse (physical and sexual) rampant in day care? How about the fact that children in day care tend to be more aggressive and less socialized that their raised-at-home peers?

Have you ever witnessed the heart-rending spectacle of a three-year-old crying and pushing its mother away – screaming that it wants to be taken to day care? Nor will you.

As a counterpoint to Hirshman, “Good Morning America” presented Debbie Klett, a mother who left a job in ad sales and founded a magazine called “Total 180,” to spend more time with her kids.

Klett: “For me, I feel it is vital to be there for my children every day, to consistently tend to their needs, to grow their self-esteem, and to praise them when they’re right, guide them when they’re not, and to be a loving, caring mom every minute of the day.”

Why, the anti-social wretch!

To clinch her argument, Hirshman notes the divorce rate is over 40%. These ninnies, says she, they devote themselves to hubby and kinder, then they’re cast aside in a divorce and see their standard of living take a nosedive.

But it was feminists who pushed no-fault divorce in the 1970s, which – they maintained -- would liberate women from stultifying marriages. Now they’re using the divorce rate to scare women into the workforce. Talk about chutzpah.

Hirshman has a prescription for the ticking of biological clocks: “Have a baby. (If you must.) Just don’t have two” which makes work outside the home difficult.

Also, Hirshman advises, find Mr. Mom -- a guy who’s into diapers and dirty dishes. “You can either find a spouse with less social power (read: money) than you or find one with an ideological commitment to gender equality (read: gender sameness).”

I can just picture the personal ad: “Feminist seeks socially inferior, self-neutered male who believes that men and women are emotionally androgynous. Objective: A matrimonial merger and the production of one child, who will be raised by the proverbial village on “The Feminist Mystique” and “Our Bodies, Our Selves” (between viewings of “Thelma and Louise” and “G.I. Jane.”).

In the ‘80s, young women had a word for such fine specimens – “wimp.”

Linda Hirshman is doing a service to humanity.
She is glaringly obnoxious proof of what conservatives have been saying for decades – Feminists hate the family. (Hirshman: “The family – with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks – is a necessary part of life, but allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or government.”)

In other words, the female insurance executive or the female junior college instructor (lecturing a roomful of bored freshmen in a 101 course) is engaged in stimulating, fulfilling, socially useful activity, while the mother who sees a human being developing on a daily basis, and shapes that life more than anyone else, is a brain-dead drudge and a dupe.

Here’s the ultimate irony: Feminists are anti-feminine. They reject hearth and home, procreation and childrearing (unless it’s done by “professionals”). They deny the maternal instinct. They condemn the feminine urge to nurture and to create a safe haven from the perils of modern life. (They also deny the male imperative to serve and protect.) Everything that’s distinctive about their sex, they abhor.

Because they hate their nature, they are self-loathing. Most are miserable – and deservedly so.

For almost 20 years, I worked in a newsroom with these resentful, envious, humorless harpies. An uglier lot you will never find – this side of “Alien vs. Predator.”

Most were deeply unhappy with their lives, always ready to take offense at imaginary slights, convinced that any lack of advancement was due to a chauvinist conspiracy and angry at those who challenged feminist dogma. They were about as much fun as Hillary on a bad hair day (speaking of resentful, envious, humorless harpies).

Who in their right mind would take life advice from such spiritually misshapen creatures? ABC News, of course.

posted October 19, 2007 01:50 PM         

I myself have taken both roles my eldest now in college and my youngest just 3 years old. It is really difficult to balance life as a mother and a career woman. Often we are forced to make unfair choices in the best interest of one or the other.

I've found on the flip-side that while focused on my career my children do act much more independantly and are less fearful than other children of stay at home moms.
While focused on my family "being a stay at home mom" The closeness and bonding is wonderful. My children actually become much more dependant on me and less aggressive.

My children, I notice more balanced in personality and charactor when they get a combination of the two as am I emotionally...
What I mean by this is:
*While being a stay at home mom: My children need an out 2-3 days a week. A social environment such as daycare, grandparents, friends house, sports, etc. as do I!
*While being a career woman: I need to have a career where I am available to my family for not just important events but also the day to day mudane ones such as homework time, dinner, doctors appointments, field trips, etc. This is best found by working for myself.

It's sad really that the average person is unable to make this desision based on personal choice. The choice is rather dictated by financial needs.

posted October 20, 2007 09:29 AM         

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Hey, yourfriendinspirit. Thanks. I do realize it's a touchy subject but it's one that I find important and worthwhile. I realize that there are many parents who can't, financially, make the decision to stay home even if they want to and that is just a really sad state of affairs, imo.

I honestly think that in most cases, the ideal situation would be to have a parent home with the child(ren) until they start school, at least part time. Maybe it isn't realistic but I really think it makes a difference to the child and to the family in general. I'm not saying working moms (or dads) are "bad" in anyway, either. I think there are caregivers out there who are very capable of raising children with love and setting a good example for them.

Maybe it's just my personal philosophy but I think that children need their parents. A baby of two full time employed parents goes into day care at about 8 am at the latest and isn't picked up until about 5:30 pm at the earliest in many situations. Most babies (once a routine is established) have a bedtime of about 8pm ... which is only about 10 hours of sleep if they wake up at 6 am and which isn't technically considered enough for a baby unless they get sufficient nap time. That's 2 and a half hours a day, at most during the week, that a baby spends with their mother and/or father ... not including sleep time as most parents do not co-sleep.

I'm not trying to be insulting but that just doesn't feel right to me. Never before have so many children been so far removed from both parents for the majority of their lives. And it is the majority, time wise. There are many studies linking behavioral problems and time spent away from parents, especially mothers ... but it just isn't PC to talk about it. I'm not trying to say women shouldn't work if they want to. It's not about women's rights ... it's about children's rights.

I also think that it would be nice if there could be a way for one parent to remain with the children (at least visibly or part of the day) while working ... a lot of work from home moms and dads do that already. It isn't easy but then neither is sacrificing income or time with your children.

And it's something few people discuss because people get offended very easily. I guess a lot of it comes down to personal beliefs but, whatever we each believe, what are our children showing us at the end of the day? How about when they're ready to leave home and all the time in between?

I just don't know how putting your children and home first (not finances or personal ambitions) became such a negative thing in many people's minds. Sure, for so long women were told that they weren't intelligent enough to work and that they had to stick to the "simple" tasks of running a home and raising children. But whose opinions were those? Oh, that's right. Men. Particularly, men who at that time had no idea just how difficult and challenging those tasks could be. So, what? We want to be stronger women by doing jobs that men have told us are good enough? Jobs that men have decided "prove" that we're intelligent enough? Meanwhile, families are falling apart and children are facing a plethora of new problems and conditions ... that, again, many studies have linked to this new phenomena of children being raised outside the family circle for most of their waking lives.

I can't imagine working full time right now and having the time and energy to raise my child according to what we believe and keep a home we're all happy in ... no matter how much help hubby puts in ... unless we hired a cleaning person, a personal chef, a dog walker, a chauffer, someone to plan our activities for us and someone else to balance our checkbooks and make sure the bills are paid. Then, maybe, I'd be able to squeeze in some personal time for myself and some for our relationship. Then again, my hubby's career is really demanding and he often works 12 hour days and travels for business.

Just my thoughts, again, and hoping to not offend anyone. It's hard to be frank sometimes without stepping on toes. I do, however, think that once our child(ren) start school that I'll probably work part-time. It's just the little years that are the most formative and that yet are so easily underestimated by some people. Not to mention the disdain many people have for the very real work raising children and creating a Home is.

posted October 24, 2007 07:52 AM         

Seriously, I don't want women to give up all career ambitions or anything. I think it's wonderful that we are now "allowed" to pursue the interests that call to us and to develop our many talents. It's really fabulous.

I just really wish there was a way to successfully balance both ... and, to me, that partly means without sacrificing what is best for our children overall. I know it's a tough world out there as far as careers go. I just don't think SAHMs and SAHDs get an appropriate shake if they take time off for their kids and then re-enter the workforce.

And I'm reminded of an Ally McBeal(sp?) episode I saw a long time ago. The blonde lawyer ... Portia? She was on a case that involved women making choices between family and career. She said something about how she sacrificed her desire to have a family in order to be the attorney she was. Why should someone who hasn't put in the same amount of time, someone who left work early for their children or took days off for family emergencies, etc., receive equal treatment/compensation?

Thinking about that and researching just how difficult it is for dual income families to make it all work lead to one of those AHA moments for me.

I just don't know what solution there is, if any. I often hear working moms complain about the fast paced lives they lead and I really feel sorry. They're up before the crack of dawn, often nuking lunch and dinner, and collapsing after trying to get as much as they could get done. How do you have time to exercise or eat healthy, take care of yourself and all your relationships, enjoy the passage of the year with your children, just enjoy your children, etc. if you haven't the time for it after all the work you put in at the office?

And then there are those statistics again. If people were to factor in the cost of two cars, two insurances, two work wardrobes, child care, two work lunches, gas for two cars, etc and etc a lot of families would find that they'd break even or with a little less income if one parent stayed home. Some families would find they had more income!

Not trying to be critical at all. I'm just saddened by the high price of "progress" sometimes.

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You know, Yin, I just knew. I was one of those teenagers who swore up and down they'd never get married, much less have children. Divorce statistics and failed marriages all around, the financial burdens of a family, no personal time, education/career ambitions, men were just a hassle, blah blah blah.

I was generally an optimistic person but was just weighed down with all these ideas of what *had* to be, you know?

posted October 24, 2007 06:00 PM         

quote:

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I just don't know what solution there is, if any. I often hear working moms complain about the fast paced lives they lead and I really feel sorry. They're up before the crack of dawn, often nuking lunch and dinner, and collapsing after trying to get as much as they could get done. How do you have time to exercise or eat healthy, take care of yourself and all your relationships, enjoy the passage of the year with your children, just enjoy your children, etc. if you haven't the time for it after all the work you put in at the office?

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When I left my abusive ex, I could have made a choice to not work, then apply for Welfare/WIC and live in a low-income apartment where the police are summoned every night for violence/noise/etc. But I didn't think that would be the best environment for my son to grow up in. So with a very heavy heart I put him in daycare and went to work. He's 11, I own my own home now in a decent neighborhood, and I can afford to give him the music and karate lessons he loves, etc. We'll see how well my decision has worked out when he reaches his teens, I guess.....

posted October 24, 2007 11:55 PM         

Zala, I'm positive you did the right thing. I know there's no easy answer to this. I know so many women who are or have been in similar situations. Your son will know that you sacrificed to give him a better life and be thankful for it. I've known kids who grew up in similar situations and have nothing but love and respect for their mothers. Then there are others whose moms did choose the low-end neighborhood and welfare. Few made it out of there and I know because I grew up there, too. We may not have been on welfare the whole time I was a child but there were times we were. My parents truly sacrificed so that my mom could stay home until I was 3 years old and then they just couldn't handle it financially. My grandmother lived with us then, too, and thankfully she took me on until I started school. I haven't ever held my mom having to go work against her because I completely understood that we would've had no food or clothes and would've surely lost the house otherwise.

But then I've known kids whose parents were quite well off and who were shuttled from day care to activities to nannies, etc. who resent their parents' 'lack of interest'. They had all the privileges growing up ... things I didn't know about until I got older ... but they didn't care. Very cynical kids, bitter and angry at the world, etc.

This is why this issue is so hard to talk about and I hope you weren't offended. I've come across single parents in the military ... can you imagine? Going on extended tdy's and leaving their children in care for maybe months at a time ... being deployed and having to ship the kid(s) off to the grandparents for a year or more ... working 12 to 14 hour days for weeks at a time ... not including the fitness requirements and the choices they make to pursue a degree. But a lot of these women (and a few men) have come from backgrounds involving domestic abuse, most without an education. Can I tell them they made the wrong choice? No, I can't and I don't think anyone with a heart would argue they did.

posted October 25, 2007 07:26 AM         

Thanks for your kind thoughts -- Of course I wasn't offended

And sharing your story helps me feel better about my choice of going to work and investing in daycare, Eleanore. I don't know if I personally could have managed to live (sanely AND safely) in the low-income housing projects, and I was very worried about my son, too young to make good choices for himself, falling in with a group of boys with little education or interest in learning, just prowling and an intro to the gang-mentality. So even though he saw less of me when I went to work, he was well-cared-for and I was lucky to find good daycare. There is little more frightening than dropping off your precious child at a stranger's house for the day, even after extensive interviewing