Yesterday, I pointed you all to a splendid post by Jane Galt who speculated that it made sense for there to be a mommy war from an economic point of view. Gains for one group meant a loss for the other. Elizabeth also responded to it. So did Jo(e).
I really liked Jane’s analysis because she assumed that women were rational creatures who weighed alternatives and made decisions that maximized the benefits for themselves and their families. Like that rational choice theory.
While I loved her approach, I didn’t always agree with her results. For example, I’m not sure that most women are aware of the Two Income Trap. You can only weigh alternatives, if you know what they are. I’m also not certain that she got men right. Jane writes,
Many men, especially high-earning men, want women who will stay at home and take the burden of childcare and housework off of them. The more that working women manage to establish working as a social equilibrium, the less competition they will have for those men.
I think most men want their wives to work.
Most guys of SAHM aren’t aware of the amount work that their wives put into raising the kids, making the dinners, and doing the homework. And they want the added income from a second salary. I’ve heard from more than a few friends that their husbands were pushing them to get a job. The women respond, "Yeah, he expects me to get a job and then still keep up the cleaning and the dinner making. He says he’ll help out, but he won’t." Women get a second shift.
Guys also assume none of the guilt and concern over their kids in childcare. All the guilt and concern has been delegated to the women.
Men’s lives aren’t changed that much by women returning to work. The women assume the guilt and the second shift. The guys get better vacations from the second income. Unless the woman goes on a real tear and forces the guy to assume his half of the housework and child responsibility, he benefits from her employment.
Apt. 11d 
I agree that men want their SAH wives to work after children arrive. Furthermore, they do assume little to none of the concern and guilt of their children in childcare situations.
I think this starts the moment women give birth. Their bodies are raging with hormones and usually take some sort of maternity leave (a few weeks to a few months). Immediately, the moms are “it” when it comes to childcare because they were at home from the moment the child was taken home from the hospital. Sometimes new mothers want to do “everything” for the infant & push the new father aside. So, the new fathers head back to work, never really knowing what is needed and knowing that their wife has everything under control.
My solution: Fathers need to ask for and use their paternity leaves once their wife returns to the workforce. If they don’t use it, these corporate policies are going to go by the wayside eventually. If fathers were to use their paternity leaves, they’d quickly develop more concern and guilt over childcare issues, too.
How can we encourage more new fathers to exercise their paternity leave policies?
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I don’t know what “most men” want, but my observation is that young women who want to be SAHM’s are much more likely to find husbands quickly than those who want a career.
Of course, there are way too many confounding variables for that observation to be reliable.
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I definitely agree with Sam that women who want to be SAHMs look for husbands at a much younger age, and thus do end up getting married more quickly.
I can’t speak for what men want, but I can speak for what I want as the spouse of a SAHD. I would love less pressure on my wage-earning ability. I really feel chained to my desk, and that too much important stuff relies solely on my ability to pull that paycheck. When confronted by colleagues on my unwillingness to challenge the boss, I’ve actually heard myself saying, “You don’t understand — I have two kids in private school. I can’t risk my position in any way.”
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Absolutely, Laura.
You are completely spot on.
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I used to jump into these discussions a lot, but they do frustrate me and I enter into them more reluctantly. Partly because there is a very quick and electric translation of particular grievances to large-scale patterns. Even within particular class sociologies, I wonder at how solid the ground is in any case.
But I guess it’s more an anecdotal thing that makes me a bit unsteady, the sense that the way these discussions get convened quickly boxes out some complex personal truths. To this many women will say, with some justice, “So now you know how that feels”. Only I am not fond in any way of retributional turns to conversations (or forms of social justice). So against the grievances, I can only say that I do see a way larger number of dads, and not just academic dads, with their kids than I recall seeing when I was young in a world of middle-class professional families. I go to grab a bagel at Panera at 9:30 and there’s dads in there with kids, obviously on a child-care day. I took my daughter to the mall a few times a week when she was eleven months old and it was winter out so we could walk around, and while there were more moms than dads doing the same, I wasn’t alone the way that I was when I was a teenager who went to a class for babysitters.
When I and my wife were both agonizing over day care for my very young child–and I was doing the bulk of the primary care during a sabbatical–I met dads who were just as agonized, and thinking hard about the problem, and trying to be part of creative solutions. When we decided to pull our daughter out of day care when she was very young, it was a mutual decision. When we put her back in nursery school at 4, it was a mutual decision. When I pick up my five-year old today at 4pm on her “full days” of Tuesday and Thursday, there are working dads there at 4pm, obviously not your normal 7-7 driven professionals of lore. I do Friday afternoons, my spouse does Monday afternoons, and a babysitter that we’ve all come to love does Wednesday afternoon.
I suck when it comes to laundry, but I cook the dinners. I suck when it comes to vacuuming but I maintain the outdoors, fix the things that are broken, maintain the household LAN, do the spring cleaning, reorganize the drawers. My wife piles stuff; I sort stuff. A lot of the difference strikes me as morally and laboriously comparable. Sometimes when there’s a difference, it’s the difference that makes no difference (and of course, is thus the thing we fight over most vigorously).
I am not a saint. I shirk some work that I probably should or could do, and yeah, if my wife feels a greater responsibility to do it, I’m a big enough asshole on some days and at some moments to let her or want her. I am certainly not in the stereotypical emo sense a “feminist man”: I think much of the cultural content of masculinity is nothing to apologize for. I think it’s perfectly ok for men to control or withhold their feelings where women might do the opposite. I like male stoicism much of the time. I think indifference to pain, emotional and physical, is a pretty groovy thing. I’ve never punched another man since I was ten years old but there are circumstances where I think “fuck yeah!” when someone punches someone, or at least when they want to punch someone. I have a preference for blogs that are less personal though not ones that are impersonal. On the other hand, I don’t enjoy, for the most part, the company of strongly male groups. I’ve always felt put-down by unmistakeably alpha male types. I always wandered away at Thanksgiving when the men wanted to watch football. I think women make better friends, by and large.
Etcetera. There is a good deal I could add to this. I only throw it out as a way of throwing my body on the tracks of various trains as they plow out of their stations. I wouldn’t bother except I like this blog a lot; it seems worth it here where it might not be elsewhere. It just seems a lot messier, and there seem to me to be more changes, than the usual complaint might offer, even if there is more justice in the usual complaint than contrarians like Caitlin Flanagan are prepared to offer. I just wonder if we couldn’t dial down some of the escalation to focus in on the country of the desirable and the possible in the domain of what’s being imagined and asked for.
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I was waiting for that. I know that there a lot of nice guys out there who read my blog and do their share at home. My hubby is a pretty good one and does as much as he can given the hours that he works. His only views on my employment status is that I’m happy.
I think that there are more guys than ever before putting energy into the home, but every single study that I’ve seen on this issue shows that women on average do much, much more. They put more hours into housework. They are responsible for their children’s childcare and school work. Arlie Russell Hochschild writes books on this. Most men work 9 to 5 jobs that don’t allow for daytime childcare.
When I lived in a boheme neighborhood in Manhattan, there were a lot of guys like you, Tim. I found lots of stay at home dads to pal around with. But when we moved to New Jersey, most families still have a traditional division of labor. I’m afraid that this is the norm.
BTW, Tim, loved your Duke post on HNN.
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Among a lot of other insights, Northridgemom writes: If fathers were to use their paternity leaves, they’d quickly develop more concern and guilt over childcare issues, too.
That’s certainly true!
My wife took four months off after our daughter was born, and I took the following two off as paternity leave [and yes, we’d do 3/3 next time and wish we had]. The spouse who is responsible for the physical transition to daycare experiences far more stress than the spouse who is able to resume work knowing that their child is at home in an environment they’re familiar with. I know, as I got to play each role in turn.
When I resumed work a week after my daughter’s birth, my difficulties were largely related to sleep deprivation and concern for my spouse. Honestly, this is pretty easy to adjust to. Six months later, I’d gone through an agonizing two weeks transition to daycare to ease her in, and resuming work posed an entirely different emotional and existential crisis. I probably spent at least a month questioning whether my job was worth it, and if I’d be better off as a SAHP.
It’s a lot harder to readjust to the workplace if you’re constantly asking yourself if it’s all worth it. My wife never had to confront this process, nor did I when she was staying home. I can only imagine that the process is harder for longer-term SAHPs.
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Laura, do you or your husband see the sort of economy-of-scale differences between suburbia and bohemia that Jane Galt writes about? I’m fortunate enough to work with men who pull enough of their share of childcare to understand an employee disappearing when daycare calls and the daughter has a fever. Outside the workplace, however, there are still the petty disincentives that come from bucking the local norm.
Modulo the specifics of his workplace, I’d guess that it’s harder for your husband to be a coparent now than it was before, since he probably gets much less understanding or sympathy from the men he interacts with.
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Are you kidding? “Men assume none of the concern” for their offspring, having “delegated (it)to the women”? Seriously, who marries a guy who assumes no concern for the well-being of his kids?
Look around you at the dads at school dropoff, hanging at the playground, in the pediatrician’s waiting room. They aren’t fathers who have “delegated all concern” to their wives, and they aren’t a minority.
My observation is that men are happy to have their wives home at least part-time when the kids are tiny. Dads seem to have the same anxiety as moms about infants in daycare. But once the infant is a 3rd grader, it’s a little different. The financial pressure to be the sole support of a family, the sole source of college tuition and retirement funds, can be considerable, as Jen says upthread. It’s unfair and breeds resentment.
Once the kids are in school, a SAH parent who is unwilling to begin to contribute financially is essentially demanding a fully-funded semi-retirement at the expense of the working spouse. “But if I went back to work, who would vaccuum?” is kind of lame, in my opinion.
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Laura, I continue to be struck by how unhappy you seem in New Jersey; that the neighborhood you moved to is filled with people very different from yourself. Especially your comment about how you didn’t run into this type of family when you still lived in the city …
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Yes, Ben. Some of my husband’s male co-workers are very unsympathetic to his family responsibilities (not all). One guy has a new born baby, works 12 hour days, and then golfs all weekend, because he neeeds some “me time.”
Jen, I’m not unhappy out here. Life is certainly easier. You have to be loaded to raise kids in Manhattan. But I do have a fish out of water thing going on. I definitely miss having like minded people to pal around with and the hubbub of the city streets. Luckily, we didn’t move to Alaska and we’re a short drive away from old buddies and good Chinese food. Suburban Chinese food sucks!
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Laura, I agree with your thoughts here. My husband is a very involved dad, but it’s true that I handle the “worrying” over the kids and far more of the housework. To be fair, he truly *thinks* he does a fair share of housework when we both work full time, but he doesn’t. Right now I’m working part time, and my husband would rather have my salary (money is tight). But the burden of the second shift keeps me standing firm on only part time work right now.
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Isn’t it possible that while moms are worrying about kids and the house, dad’s are worrying about how the mortgage is going to get paid, how his wife’s student loans are going to get paid, how the health insurance is going to get paid, how the two cars are paid for.
Think of all the stresses of the workworld, and imagine you are the sole provider of the money to support your family. That if you take paternity leave, you jeopardize your career and thus the money that pays the mortgage, the students loans, the cars.
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>His only views on my employment status is that I’m happy.
I think this is a pretty common male viewpoint assuming the money and work situation are going OK. To me, this is part of a silver-lining to the transfer of child-related decision making and worry to the mom. Actual joint decision making on some child-related issues, such as whether the mom should stay home or not, can often just complicate things.
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Wondering how many families in the US are choosing the mom-works-full-time and dad-stays-at-home-with-kids-while-they’re-young model. Out here on the west coast (of NY), a decent number of my female colleagues have stay-at-home husbands (and so can avoid the 2-income trap you mention); plus, our faculty union (another benefit of working at a public university) has been pushing for paid family leave (maternity, paternity, eldercare) on the grounds that it’s a necessary recruitment strategy as the generation that entered SUNY in the ’70s retires and it becomes increasingly apparent that this generation of male and female new hires has different attitudes about work/family balances.
I think the larger issue is seeing how families handle the paid/unpaid work division of labor and how that’s changing in light of the decline in most real wages across the country. This way of approaching the problem may get it out of the usual “but I bring home the bacon” or “I care about my kids” male reactions and help bridge the somewhat media-hyped female “careerist vs. homebody” mudwrestling match (now that was a fun metaphor to mix). Should we be looking for a way to get so-called “women’s work” paid (so they’re not dependent on their partners’ retirement savings or how good the divorce settlement can be for economic security in their old age)?
It might be worth looking at how traditions are changing in other countries, as well. Japanese culture, which is sexist in so many ways even many conservative guys here would be aghast at, traditionally put the wife in charge of the family finances. Husbands would literally hand over their pay checks to their wives and get a cash allowance. Wives would be responsible for managing the entire household budget, including savings (recall the etymology of the word “economy”). How this system is changing in light of greater women’s participation in the labor system, the recent difficulties in the Japanese economy, and reforms to make the system closer to U.S.-style capitalism are put into place, among other changes, would be worth looking into for comparative purposes, at least.
More questions than insights, sorry.
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most of the SAHM’s I know of have nannies or similiar, a la Caitlin Flanagan..
“most men want their wives to work”
I disagree. I think most men want what’s best for their children. The problem is largely economic – without two incomes, it becomes very difficult to get the house in a good school area, pay for all the extramural activities that schools no longer provide – art, music, sport – etcetera. Better vacations aren’t really in it.
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Doug K,
Did public schools ever provide that much in the way of art and music? And has the range of sports offered by public schools really changed for the worse in the US?
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Amy, I can tell you what my sister tells me. She’s an elementary school teacher, and she goes on at length about the horrors of No Child Left Behind, and how schools have dropped everything they’re not getting tested on — recess, gym, art & music, even social studies. When looking into kindergartens for my oldest child I talked to her, and mentioned my concern about one school not having much play space. She said not to worry about it, that I would probably not encounter a kindergarten that gave more than a few minutes of recess time a day, and I would never find a school that had gym more than twice a week. They need the classroom time too badly.
I think the dropping of these “non-essential” classes has been happening for a long time, but has accelerated over the last few years.
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Just as SAHM moms w/nannies are a small fraction of the whole (statistically most SAHM are poor or working class), so too are men who do 50/50 of the housework and childcare concerns. Any observations from artsy academic neighborhoods have to be questioned. Statistically, men do less at home and this certainly colors their impressions of what women do at home and makes them less impressed with their efforts. Hence, they want the income from their wives to use if not for vacations, then to help with the mortgage or private school tuition or whatever. My claim that men want their wives to work rather than stay at home still holds.
I just want to say that these debates about housework aren’t trivial. It really dominates women’s lives. It takes more than 20 minutes to make tacos for dinner. There’s the time to figure out what everyone will eat. The shopping for hamburger with a three year old in tow. Don’t even talk to me about laundry for four after a stomach virus.
And the second shift doesn’t just happen, because men are assholes. When I start working full time in a year or so, I’m still going to have 95% of the responsibility for the kids and the housework, because my husband’s job will pay the mortgage and mine won’t. My job will be major amounts of responsibility, but starting at the ground floor at a community college doesn’t bring in much dough. I’m dreading doing it all. Maybe we can hire some help. Maybe my husband can downsize a bit. We’ll see.
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Why? Why do you do it? What happens if it isn’t done? Kids need to be taken care of, housework doesn’t. So what happens if you don’t do it and wait until your husband does it? Will the walls come crashing down? Will the health department be called?
I say this partially in jest, but as a lesbian professor I once had in a feminist legal theory class said, “If I have to listen to straight women complain about housework one more time, I think I am going to start voting Republican. I can’t tell you the amount of intellectual time I’ve spent listening to all this complaining.”
Maybe it’s because he views come from being in a same-sex relationships. You rarely hear lesbians or gay men complaining about how work gets done, because it just gets done. It’s more egalitarian, there are fewer power struggles over, there are no fixed sex roles. It would be interesting to see how same-sex couples and families resolve these conflicts and what we can learn from them.
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Why are straight women always griping about the housework? Either they’re idiots or they have a real grievance. Hmmm. What could it be?
I’m perfectly content to let the tub fill up with toxins and let the beds go unmade. Those tasks only happen right before my mother in law comes for a visit. The problem is that most housework overlaps with child tending. Food shopping, cooking, laundry, homework — all those things are essential for the kids. If I don’t feed the kids, the health inspector won’t come, but child protective services will.
I am curious if gay couples experience less strife about this issue. I hope that some of my gay readers are still in this thread. If not, I’ll make it a post sometime.
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It’s been my observation that there are certain social/economic groups for whom having your wife not work is a status symbol, or a way to fit in with the other guys in your workplace/church/professional organization/neighborhood. I have relatives who are such people. Those of us working in, as you say, “artsy academic neighborhoods” often don’t see this world – but it does exist.
I do, however, agree with you that there are a lot of men looking at their at-home wife as some kind of slacker who could certainly be fitting a 40-hour job in as well as doing everything she already does. Because how hard could it be to get dinner on the table? In restaurants they can do it in 15 minutes! (D’oh!)
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I agree with Laura about the overlap between childcare and housework. Basic housework (grocery shopping, cooking, washing dishes, laundry, picking up toys/supervising toy pick up) is not something that you can simply suspend, unless you live in a hotel. And even in a household with an SAHM (like me), a husband who does huge amounts of housework, grocery delivery, bimonthly housecleaning, hot and cold running babysitters, and quite a lot of delivery food, having a three-year-old and a one-year-old at home generates immense amounts of non-negotiable housework. There has to be fresh fruit and milk and diapers and baby wipes for the kids, there have to be clean clothes, there have to be clean bottles and sippy cups, etc. And none of this just happens.
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I’d like to add that children behave better in clean, organized environments – or at least mine does. My son can play on his own for up to an hour when I’ve just cleaned the living room. If I let it go his attention span plummets to 10-15 minutes.
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Laura, as a gay man in a relationship–admittedly with no kids–I will give my take on.
We do whatever we are best at. I like to cook, my partner doesn’t. But he likes to grocery shop. Neither of us got the gay “clean and neat” gene, so we sit down and say, “If you clean the bathrooms this week, I will clean the kitchen.” It’s negotiated. Laundry just gets done. We don’t even really negotiate over it.
We both work and make similar amounts of money, although my job is less stressful. Admittedly, we don’t have set sexual norms. Nothing is “women’s work” or “men’s work.” On the same token, neither of us dictate to the other how things are cleaned, or laundered, or made. I don’t like the way he folds sheets, but they’re folded, so I don’t worry about it.
What I notice with straight couples is that women spend a lot of time telling their husbands what they’ve done wrong. We now even joke about it among friends. Our male married friends complain a lot about being asked to do something–which they don’t seem to mind–but then being criticized for the way it’s done. Thus, they quit doing it.
I can’t think of any same-sex couples I know who complain about the division of labor. Disputes are more likely to be around things being too equal or separate. Same-sex couples have a tough time become a “we” and often view things as “mine” “his” and “ours.”
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Laura,
I have two words for you come September.
Hire help.
No, four words
Hire lots of help.
Worried about the money? You should adopt my slogan — it’s less expensive than getting divorced.
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I’ve had the same experience as Kate, too. It’s much more entertaining to play with toys that have been put away than with toys that have been lying out for a long time. So putting away toys is not some sort of nutty make work project.
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My sister and her partner don’t seem to have the kind of housework/child care arguments as I see in opposite-sex households. (Money, holiday schedules with in-laws, etc.: just the same as everyone else.) My sister does the outside work, her partner does the laundry, they share the cooking, they do about equal amounts of child care and pet care. But I think what really helps is to have approximately the same idea of what “clean” is; maybe that’s easier for same-sex partners, but maybe it just depends on what kind of a household you were raised in.
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I have two college age kids. I have always worked, though not necessarily full time. I come from a family of 5 kids where I was the oldest. I think families today don’t make kids take responsibility for their own mess and daily living overhead. Once kids are school age they can do their own laundry and make their own school lunches. They can clean their own rooms, and help out with the common areas of the house. Yes, it takes effort to get the ball rolling, but in the end it is worth it, both for your sanity, and for the kids’ ability to take responsibility and live in the world.
If your living room needs to be uncluttered, make your child put away their toys. My kids’ Montessori preschool had a rule about “put away your job before you take out another job”. Even little kids understand this and accept it. It can be done at home.
Accept and acknowledge the contribution to family life made by your kids when they do these chores. They will be happier for it.
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The Montessori rule is a marvelous one in theory, but not one which I plan to use on my 12-month-old child any time soon. I agree that it is much more sensible for use on my 3-year-old (who recently quit preschool and is home most of the time), but the flesh is weak, and I don’t care to spend every minute of every day policing the toy shelves.
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Of course a 12 month old can’t organize toys on shelves, but probably can help you pick up toys and put them in a laundry basket. (That’s what I used for living room toys when my kids were that age.) Lots of comments like “don’t you feel grown up to put away your toys! You really help mom keep the living room tidy!” along with the natural consequences (“we can’t go to the park/have juice/watch sesame street until the toys are in their basket” and you might be surprised that soon you don’t have to be the police, just an occasional reminder. The point is that it is just as important for our kids to master these living skills as dressing themselves and tying their shoes. And they will be happier if their parents aren’t resentful and spending time blaming each other for not doing their share of the housework. At least, it worked for us.
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cafl — I’ve been on a mission for past few months to make my 6 year old more responsible for his stuff. Not just putting his puzzles away, but he’s got to bring in his coat and backpack from the car and put his socks in the hamper. All that. I’m constantly bellowing, “PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, PEOPLE.” Got to raise the boys to better than their fathers.
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Wow, I was iffy on the whole having a kid thing, now I’m decided. No way.
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I’m a one great big bloggy prophylactic. No, kids are great. Really.
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“Got to raise the boys to better than their fathers.”
Or better equipped to deal with their wives? 🙂
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Heeey! Thanks, Michael, for the input on same sex relationships. If you ever see any studies or articles comparing hetero and gay relationships, let me know. Really interesting stuff.
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I’ve been so overworked and been holding off on the temptation to weigh in, but no more…
Perhaps one incentive for fathers to become more involved with the child-rearing is to ensure that the daughters are raised better than their mothers were. At the very least, it might be useful for the daughters to have a role model demonstrating that childcare situations are not inextricably bound up with guilt. Concern and involvement with childcare arrangements are one thing. Guilt that is felt regardless of the arrangement is something very different. I would call anyone out, present host included, who assumes that (a) such guilt must be part of child-rearing or (b) that if women are more likely to feel such guilt, regardless of involvement, that is an argument in its favor. Why can’t a woman be more like a man?
And in response to Northridgemom, this comes from a man who has taken paternity leave from a high-powered job once and will do so again shortly. The guilt gene hasn’t yet shown itself.
And in response to that first comment, men taking paternity leave is a good thing, but I’m not sure how it would change the situations where “new mothers want to do ‘everything’ for the infant & push the new father aside.”
To expand on Michael’s observation about wives & husbands, I think that women sometimes get frustrated with the learning curve that men need to go through in the process of learning a domestic task that they were not taught when younger. Yes, I know that sometimes men will affect helplessness as a passive-aggressive maneuver. But sometimes it’s just a necessary trial-and-error process in operation, which frustrates women who went through that process long ago and can’t identify with the starting point anymore – or who can’t identify with why the man hasn’t picked up the woman’s accrued experience, which is sometimes a justified complaint (showing he’s taken her contributions for granted) but sometimes that experience isn’t something you can pcik up without doing it.
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One good dad trick is to watch the kids by yourself as much as possible. Take all the kids out of the house for as long as you can or get your wife to go out and do something on her own. You quickly develop a minimal level of competence in child-rearing and you don’t have to do things the exact same way as your wife.
Getting the kids out of the house typically works better because it doesn’t leave as much evidence of of your sub-par child raising skills. Also, don’t split up the kids, take them all or your wife really won’t get a break.
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Dr. Manhattan — Yes, absolutely, to your point that men have to learn to muddle through on their own without backseat parenting from their wives. Yes, yes, and yes. Men also need to have a solid block of time to pick up some of those skills either by completely taking over for part of the weekend (as Joe O advised) or by taking a serious paternity leave. Experience breeds sympathy.
And you know that I’m the Queen of Guilt. It’s probably due to the whole dysfunctional Catholic upbringing. It’s also compounded by Ian’s communication problems. I have to set up daycare for him soon and I’m dragging my feet on it. He’s going to cry and cry. The lady isn’t going to understand him and is going to make him scream. Excuse me while I go vomit.
But guilt is different from concern and responsibility. Not every woman is as much of a guilt queen as myself. But studies continually report that nearly all women are responsible for finding childcare for their kids, packing up the diaper bags, remembering to deal with vacation times, choosing the appropriate place, and staying home on sick days. Even if your kid is in daycare and you’re content with the situation, there is still a lot of management and stress involved.
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“taking a serious paternity leave.”
Would this really help? It’s not while kids are newborns that dad’s learn to parent, it’s when they are no longer breastfeeding and dependent on the mother. While clearly dad can help clean and care and nurture the mother, I’m not sure a lot of parenting is going to take place during a paternity leave.
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In response to Michael, yes, I think paternity leave would really help because it will be one of the few times in life where a block of time (a few weeks or a month) is dedicated to a father being the primary caregiver of a child (however young). If there are older children included during a paternity leave, that would even be more ideal. When a father is a primary caregiver at any point in time (not just an occasional afternoon to give their wife a break), it becomes the father’s responsibility to make the pediatrician appointments, to answer the pediatrician’s questions (by himself), to react to the pediatrician’s comments, etc. When the pediatrician tells you directly that little Johnny isn’t thriving because of xyz, it’s more devasting than when your spouse tells you. (And that’s only one example.)
Furthermore, to Joe O’s point, I agree that fathers need to develop their own way of taking care of the kids without the mom around (mostly to avoid her tendency to intervene)…. Mothers learn plenty from fathers – it’s supposed to be a team anyway, eh? Fathers aren’t sub-par parents usually unless they’re practically absent from the family. Fathers just need to jump into child-rearing and the moms need to allow that to happen.
Finally, I can’t think of a mom (unless she’s never entered the paid workforce or has zero financial know-how), in the paid workforce or at home, who doesn’t also worry about the mortgage payments, student loan payments, healthcare costs, etc. in addition to concern for the kids.
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I think that Michael is making parenting-theory assumptions without necessarily realizing it. Like it or not, some philosophies are more suitable to equitable coparenting than others. If one or both parents insist on full-naturalist Attachment Parenting, the father is going to be pushed into a traditional role simply due to biology.
If parents insist on that, I’m sure that a father can become a SAHD after his child is weaned and go through the root-hog-or-die experience of being a primary caregiver. But I suspect that it would take a greater incentive than egalitarian ideals for a father of a two-year-old to suddenly take a few months off work. Those of us who find ways to avoid mother-baby contact for every feeding probably face better odds.
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With our first, I wound up pumping from almost the beginning because breastfeeding wasn’t going to work otherwise.
My husband is an academic and was on summer vacation, so he wound up doing just about all the baby care initially, while I pumped and washed bottles and did other housework. I barely laid a hand on the baby for weeks, and my husband became very capable. So I’m all for giving fathers the opportunity to develop childcare skills.
That said, I have to agree with Michael. It’s a huge headache pumping large quantities of milk for an infant, because it nearly doubles the work involved. You pump (say for 15 minutes) and then feed the infant the bottle (probably 10 minutes). Pumping, washing bottles and equipment, and taking care of the milk is very nearly a part-time job all by itself, and it is immensely stressful to watch your supplies in the fridge dwindling and to have to step up the pumping to keep up with a hungry baby. Once you start solids (around 6 months nowadays) you can relax, but for that initial 6 months, it’s quite difficult. An additional factor is that the hormonal effects of lactation can make mom sleepy, slow, and a little bit crazy–not your ideal employee (I’m weaning right now and it is amazing how much more energetic and clear-headed I’m starting to feel). There is formula, of course, but it isn’t very trendy these days.
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I realize that middle and upper-middle class people have their struggles. Like everyone, they have trials and travails, sadnesses, frustrations, and unmet needs. But as I read this thread, I’m amazed at the basic attitude of entitlement and perrogative expressed — or exhibited — here. I don’t mean to be a kill joy, but folks should read through this thread again with an eye toward the class issues exhibited. As I read the thread, it appears that most who have commented actually have a choice. For most, work is not a choice but an absolute requirement — nevermind whether work is fulfilling (a hard notion for me to grasp) or a mind-numbing slow death (closer to my experience). I guess I have a hard time sympathizing with the women who stay at home with their kids and have no one to talk to. What is it like to actually have that choice? What is it like to have choices in employment as opposed to a perverse sense of grattitude for the offer of a low paying, boring, or physically demanding job? I gather the households of the stay-at-home parents have a well stocked pantry, seasonal wardrobes, and more than two pairs of shoes per person. Wow.
Again, I realize that middle class folks have feelings and wants etc., but at the same time, a little perspective on those of us who can’t even dream of the choice many of you appear to have might help here.
I suppose, too, that if anyone responds to this, they will probably explain how they have financial woes, student loan payments, and ends never seem to meet. But those ends fail to meet in nice houses with wainscoating and crown molding, nice old hard wood floors with “character,” and an early ’90’s Mini-van or Toyota outside (or in the garage). The ends for many of the rest of us fail to meet in dwellings that fall an entire head of hair short of the kinds of places I suspect folks writing here live. Heck, where most of you live is beyond my wildest dreams!
To work or not work, that is the question. Really? What a question!
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And millions in Africa can only dream of complaining about their problems on the Internet. Give it a rest, cmd. I dont think there’s any reason to apologize for discussing issues faced by the majority of Americans who fall between the extremes of wealth and poverty.
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A majority? Hmmm. Maybe in your neighborhood, not in mine. And I bet all of you have health insurance, too. I can’t remember when I last went to a doctor.
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cmd, the poverty rate in this country is below 13%. Even if you assume that the threshold is far too low and arbitrarily double the number of people you’d consider “really” living in poverty, that still leaves three quarters of the population as middle or upper class.
Furthermore, you characterize the decision to stay home as a luxury of the wealthy. In fact, upper and upper-middle class women in two-income households have the luxury of work outside the home — generally poorer women have a lower opportunity cost of staying at home, as their earning potential may not cover the cost of daycare.
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cmd – I hope that you go onto every guy’s blog that discusses fine wine, higher education, and cars and remind them that they’re lucky, too.
Yes, we ARE lucky. I’m lucky to have to two mostly whole boys and a loving family. I’m lucky to have a good education and no cavities. I’m lucky I can vote. There are many people in the world living in desperate poverty and whenever I can, I post links to charitable organizations.
After we give thanks, I think we can still talk about wine, education, cars, and work.
And cmd, read this.
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That statistic about the poverty rate is bunk. And you acknowledge this possibility. So fine. But I would dispute even doubling that number. On an anecdotal basis, multiplying by three sounds closer to accurate. I know a lot of people making about $30K who, while not as poor as, say, a family of 4 making the same amount, are on a decidely downwardly mobile track — or rather, once they get up to 40K they’re probably maxed out given their educations etc. (and these are all college educated people … heck, a few of them are Ph.D.’s who are adjuncts who can’t get hired in the corporate sector)
Nicepost, Laura, and the comment section is even better.
Lastly, I find the point about poor people staying at home because of escalating day care costs to be salient. However, it doesn’t negate my criticism about those who weigh whether to stay at home or work as a choice. It’s a bit of a sham to try to compare a 32 year old married woman with a BA degree in journalism, plus 5 years PR experience under her belt, with a high school educated woman with 2 kids who can work at Walmart if she can afford day care.
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Laura, thanks for reposting that old post on your old neighborhood. It was even better than I remembered it.
cmd, what is crown molding?
Assuming that I am one of the objects of your ire, I think it a bit misplaced. For one, my husband and I aren’t home owners (certainly not of a house with crown moldings and wood floors) and are nowhere close to it. Secondly, despite being the parents of a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, we have never owned a car in our entire lives. I relish the other trinkets and goodies associated with the upper-middle class metropolitan lifestyle (decaf skim iced mochas! pad thai! drunken noodles! orange chicken! curry! museums! bookstores! the GapKids sale rack!) but my enjoyment is definitely magnified by having had a very modest rural upbringing.
I hope you realize that when you complain about your “low-paying,” “boring,” “physically demanding work,” all the mommies out there (SAHM and WOTH) are nodding and thinking about their pay for their work at home ($0), and the last time they walked home from the park pushing an infant in a stroller with one hand, with a hysterically flailing 35-pound preschooler swung over the other shoulder. I have no idea what you think stay-at-home moms do with their time, but boring, low-paying, and physically demanding is a fairly good summary of the job. Although even that doesn’t quite cover those days when one discovers that a toddler has stripped off their clothes and dirty diaper and smeared excrement all over a crib, crib tent, sheet, several blankets, a multitude of stuffed animals, themselves, and whatever else they could reach.
Lastly, as other people have pointed out, a whole lot of women can’t afford to work, because the cost of childcare would eat up their earnings.
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cmd writes: However, it doesn’t negate my criticism about those who weigh whether to stay at home or work as a choice.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t your criticism essentially boil down to “you people are awful for talking about your petty, privilidged problems, and your issues are all invalid”? Which itself reduces to a simple “shut up.”
I could certainly be mistaken — possibly you’re trying to broaden the discussion rather than shut it down — but I’m afraid I can’t see it.
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I hope you realize that when you complain about your “low-paying,” “boring,” “physically demanding work,” all the mommies out there (SAHM and WOTH) are nodding and thinking about their pay for their work at home ($0), and the last time they walked home from the park pushing an infant in a stroller with one hand, with a hysterically flailing 35-pound preschooler swung over the other shoulder.
oooh, snap, girlfriend.
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Thanks, Laura! Had to look that one up in the urban dictionary, but now I know.
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I will definitely say that in the portion of middle America (central Ohio) where I am currently living, SAHM-dom definitely has a lower middle class flavor to it. SAHMs are younger, poorer, and (at least it seems to me) generally less educated than many of the SAHMs I knew in the DC area. People drive OLD cars, live in small houses with old carpeting, and dress their kids mostly in hand-me-downs. Some of them work part-time, but those jobs are mostly retail or child-care. Here, SAHMs don’t seem to be the coastal stereotype of the upper-class opt-outers. This is, of course, a more culturally conservative area, but most of them seem to be SAH by default: they got married young (maybe dropping out of college after a year or two), had a kid, then another, and possibly another or two after that. When you’ve got more than two kids, the childcare expense gets pretty hefty, even if your sitter is your friend’s cousin’s grandmother and not an accredited childcare center. And many of them have husbands with much more traditional ideas about the appropriate roles of men and women. I don’t hear so much angst about the division of labor from them (though they do complain about men who won’t pick up their socks) because it’s much more of a given.
Now, I don’t think is a necessarily better state of affairs, but I do think that it’s important to consider this reality of SAHMdom. Furthermore, “what about the low-income women who have to work” has become pretty much the standard tactic for shutting down any discussion about division of labor, child-rearing decisions, or work-life balance in middle class households. The existence of class-based inequalities, however, doesn’t invalidate the experiences of middle class women, or make them an illegitimate topic of discussion, particularly among middle class.
And, FWIW, I have never met any SAHM, either in the DC area (though I’m sure they exist) or in Ohio, who also had a nanny.
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“I hope you realize that when you complain about your “low-paying,” “boring,” “physically demanding work,” all the mommies out there (SAHM and WOTH) are nodding and thinking about their pay for their work at home ($0), and the last time they walked home from the park pushing an infant in a stroller with one hand, with a hysterically flailing 35-pound preschooler swung over the other shoulder.”
If we’re speaking of middle-class SAHM, then that $0 income is supplemented by a rather healthy income stream coming from some other source. If we’re speaking of people from a less advantaged income strata, then the pithy point is more valid.
Where I live, I see SAHM burdened with the screaming todler on the sholder while pushing the infant in the $500 stroller. It’s very hard to well up much sympathy.
And yes, Ben, I was trying to broaden the discussion. Perhaps I’m speaking about a strata of the middle class that is at the bottom of what counts as middle class. These people straddle the line between middle class and “working poor.” I was thinking in an anecdotal context: a husband who is an adjunct, wife is an admin asst.; another husband who’s an adjunct, wife is a bookstore assistant manager; husband who is a former adjunct, now an office worker, wife is a nurse, etc. I admit, though, that when I opened this can of worms, I hadn’t thought it through to the level of socio-economic specificity that is coming to the fore now.
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Where I live, I see SAHM burdened with the screaming todler on the sholder while pushing the infant in the $500 stroller. It’s very hard to well up much sympathy.
Look, I’m with you on that. Nothing sets my teeth on edge like conspicuous consumption. But does a guy driving a Jaguar bother you as much as the mom with the $500 stroller? Why are you singling out wealthy mothers for your ire?
And mothers, across the economic spectrum, have many of the same problems juggling work and family. It doesn’t make sense to divide ourselves by class. Much better to find the commonalities and look for change.
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C’mon, that’s unfair. Post something about guys in Jaguars and I will happily vent my spleen upon them. Better, add the guy in the Jag with the sunglasses permanently affixed to his forehead, presumably to guard the Chakras from the harmful effects of ultra-violet light … Anyhow. We were talking about what men want — granted, we’ve drifted a tad from that — and that morphed into a discussion about SAHMs, class, etc.
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Middle class people don’t buy $500 strollers, by the way. If they can afford a $500 stroller on a single income, then they are upper class. Or waaaaaaay over their head in consumer debt. And they are a tiny portion of the general population, even as their flashy $500 stroller makes them more noticeable.
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cdm,
I’m still finding your position a bit hard to take. If we take a middle class couple where one parent decides to stay home with a child, that family has just lost one income, as well as incurring major expenses that will continue for about two decades. Why are we supposed to be beating up on this family? If anything, isn’t this family (by substantially reducing per person revenue) reducing the amount of inequity in society at large?
In my own family, my husband makes a good (but not spectacular) income as an academic (as well as doing some computer programming on the side as a paying hobby). While my oldest was a toddler, I did some tutoring, and also a good deal of commercial babysitting, and was able to add to the family income without leaving home. Now that we have two kids (nearly 4 and 1), we are stretched pretty thin (6 hours sleep is an unusually good night’s sleep around here, and we are usually still doing housework around 1 AM) and I’m not making any money. I usually have at least six hours of help a week from student sitters, and manage to sneak in an occasional afternoon nap (all of our relatives live thousands of miles away, so we have to pay for every minute of help). Our oldest is heading to full-day pre-K in the fall, which should free me up quite a lot, as well as enabling me to give the younger child the sort of attention that he hasn’t been getting. I’ll also be helping out in the pre-K classroom (perhaps doing some ESL work with the kids who need it), and I’m thinking of starting a tutoring service that I can do while with the younger child. Hopefully, we’ll be able to make a small dent in the Visa bill, which has of late gotten rather monstrous. Such is the life of an SAHM! It’s definitely not all Starbucks and seducing the pool boy.
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Elizabeth actually did some work on SAHM and income. It’s better than anecdotes.
As much as I think you are wrong that SAHM are spoiled rich girls, I do appreciate an occasional reality check. There are people worse off than us. Doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have this conversation. And you must be careful of using this line of argument to prevent discussion about reforms, because I have seen it used by those who want no progressive action. Just as middle class women have it better than then women in the inner cities, so too do you have it better than people in Africa. Why should you feel deprived about not having health care, when there are people in Africa with eyelashes growing on the inside of their eyelids with flies feasting on their eye puss?
There are always people worse off than us and we should think about them first, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make other reforms that helps everybody regardless of income or status.
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So I and the other 43 million people in this country who lack health insurance should stop complaining about that fact because there are people in Africa, and all over the world, who are worse off? Is that really your argument?
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cmd,
Can’t you tell that Laura is trying her best to agree with you? I believe what Laura means is that
1. We shouldn’t forget about poor and sick people in the US just because there are poorer and sicker people in Africa.
2. The fact that some women in the US face poverty, rape, violence, etc. is not an excuse for the husbands of more fortunate women to shirk housework and childcare responsibilities.
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cmd — no, no, no. That’s not MY argument. I believe in universal health care. I was just saying that other people make that argument, using the same line of reasoning as you did in the beginning. should have made that clearer.
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Laura,
It was crystal clear to any charitable reader.
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99% of what bloggers write about is irrelevant by cmd’s standards, and equally worthy of dismissal. Blogs themselves largely are. And as some have observed, cmd is easily outflanked on the other side: the Walmart mother ends up looking like she is in an enviously wonderful situation compared to the mother of children in northern Uganda who keeps losing her kids to the Lord’s Resistance Army who turn the girls into concubines and the boys into killers. Etc.
It’s one thing to suggest that people have a sense of proportionality about their problems. Here I think maybe cmd is right that these kinds of discussions of middle to upper-middle class parenting and domesticity frequently do escalate quickly to disproportionate levels and various forms of self-indulgence. But cmd, as I see it, isn’t saying, “Get a sense of proportion”, but “Stop talking about it at all, because other people have REAL problems”.
I think that’s always a pointless kind of response to any blog or any ongoing debate. We live our lives, not someone else’s lives; in each of our lives, there are issues, problems, dissatisfactions. Effacing your own life, your own issues, your own reactions, ignoring the ethnographic texture of your immediate social worlds, in favor of endless pious genuflection at the holy shrine of some constituency of “deserving poor” is an upper-middle-class indulgence in its own right, and usually phonier by far than talking about how to do right by your children or your spouse.
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Back there somewhere I said somehting about persepctive. I should have said proportion as that is what I meant. And no I’m not saying stop talking about this issue.
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Hi there….
“Guys also assume none of the guilt and concern over their kids in childcare. All the guilt and concern has been delegated to the women.”
Not sure how guilt is “delegated”, especially in this case… would be interested in a better explanation, regardless…
That women would *assume* guilt for childcare makes some sense… after all, society/feminism has granted the socially accepted options of career or home (or a mix), while men have not been granted this. Society gives men the option of work or prison, basically.
Because women are granted this option, then how that option is exercised should naturally weigh on women’s minds. You have the option, you have the responsibilty for the effects of how you choose.
The option of careers for women have literally left children in the cold. The loving attention given to our flesh and blood, especially in the earliest years, is now provided by a business or delivered by a “provider” for hire.
If you think your value to your child is no better than that of a paid provider, raise your hand. Nobody? Good.
Now, far from being removed from the situation, men do care about the exercise of this option… they know it affects children, and men (and many women) argued this point in the heat of the feminist battle for career options for women. “Children need their mothers at home.” was the loudly and clearly expressed position. It could not be missed.
All of the stories that I know of where couples with careers were considering daycare, the men have been the most outspoken in finding solutions that avoided daycare. This does not equal “guilt”. This is action instead of guilt. The men I know said, in effect, “don’t accept the situation. Take action.”
This is my story as well… taking different shifts, engaging family members instead of hiring daycare, working shorter hours etc. were part of our strategy to avoid daycare, because we chose not to accept sending our kids to the lowest bidder.
My wife, and the wives of the other families did not press for this, but they did sign on with their husbands leading.
This is of course only a small sample of people… people are not monolithic in behaviors, but my experience was very different from what you described above… and the fathers cared more and did more to protect their children from the side effects of the choice to have a career that women uniqely have.
I read talk of “reforms”… and I’m not sure exactly in what area… but if it is in respect to raising children, then there is nothing to “reform”. If you think there is, then you don’t understand the world you live in. There are men, there are women, they have sex, children arrive, then it is time to make decisions and take actions. That’s it. If you think there is more, then you are avoiding your situation.
We are no more and no less than birds laying eggs and feeding their young until they can leave the nest.
Mike
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Mike, may I ask if you’ve been that full-time caregiver for a period longer than a couple of days? Did you consider becoming a SAHD among your options, or did you feel you didn’t have that choice?
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It’s a bit of a sham to try to compare a 32 year old married woman with a BA degree in journalism, plus 5 years PR experience under her belt, with a high school educated woman with 2 kids who can work at Walmart if she can afford day care.
One of the problems that we could bring up here is the fact that the only job that the woman with the BA may be able to get after she stays home with her two kids for five years is that same Walmart job. And if she gets divorced? Well, she’s in the same position as the younger woman, except she’s 15 or more years older.
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Late to this, but another perspective anyway.
I agree with most of what you said; most of the men I know are certainly happier with their wives in the workforce. They like daycare, don’t mind putting their kids into daycare. In fact I wrote a substantial post earlier this week about how I had to essentially browbeat my husband into not taking my daughter into daycare on every single day he had off from work, and it still took months. He feels no guilt over daycare.
Neither do I, though. The difference in our case is not one of guilt (my daughter thrives in her daycare, and I know it) but of desire. The time he spends with her in the evenings adn on weekends is perfectly sufficient to his vision of himself as a father, but it is not sufficient to me in my vision of myself as a mother. Shortly put, I miss my little girl, and he doesn’t. I’ve spent the past two years grappling with this question b/c I fully anticipated equal parenting and equal investment, including emotional investment.
But this, this is where I disagree:
Guys also assume none of the guilt and concern over their kids in childcare. All the guilt and concern has been delegated to the women.
I don’t think it’s been “delegated,” or “assumed.” After a substantial amount of research on my own part as well as my own experiences–including the daycare scenario, above–I believe that there is a biological basis to this difference. One exacerbated and exaggerated by socialization, to be sure; but not created by culture. For instance, some studies have demonstrated that men have higher thresholds for response to infant distress than women do, i.e., hook men and women up to instruments that measure their release of stress hormones, and you’ll find that while women will show a release of stress hormones at the sound of any infant cry (mothers and non-mothers alike) men will show a response only at the sound of a PAIN cry (fathers and non-fathers alike). So all those new fathers who are blithely oblivious of the baby crying and it drives the new mother to distraction and she wonders why the hell he just SITS THERE and doesn’t do anything? Biological, at least in part–he doesn’t feel it the same way.
If you’re interested in getting your hands on a good scientific exploration of this research, I can’t recommend Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book “Mother Nature” highly enough.
Anyway. It appears to me that there is a difference in the way men and women approach parenting, biologically–that women are more predisposed to respond–and this makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint since until quite recently no man could ever have been completely sure that any given infant was his, so making substantial investments of time and energy and resources into their care would not have been selected for. As with any other difference between the sexes there is substantial variation within each sex, far more than between them, so just as you have many women who are taller than many men even though men are on average taller than women, you have many men who have lower thresholds for response than many women even though on average women have lower thresholds. So you can’t make any absolute claims about mothers and fathers on the basis of population-wide statistics. But from the point of view of public policy, or from determining what mothers and fathers want on the aggregate level, I think it makes sense to consider that some of these differences may in the end not be terribly amenable to change.
Hrdy goes to great lengths in her book to demonstrate that men can be equally nurturing and that the father/child bond can be as strong as the mother/child bond, but the work she describes to create this situation sounds to me too exhausting to be worth it on a personal level. Especially when I consider that we honestly tried to make that work in our own relationship when my daughter was born (he took part of the parental leave, I returned to work full-time a month early and pumped, etc.) it still didn’t bear fruit–he just doesn’t miss her as much as I do. He loves her to pieces, he’s a great dad, he does a lot of the hands-on caring work of parenting, he gets up in the night when she cries, and so on. He hasn’t delegated anything to me, nor has anything been assumed. It just doesn’t occur to him to want any more time with his daughter than he has.
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When I first met my husband many years ago,
he had no children of his own. I had 3 young
children, and, worked about 12 hours a day
to keep a roof over our heads. I never had
the luxury of staying home much. My husband
was a god send for me, he took over a lot of
the house work, cooking and child care. No,
I did not force him to, he actually wanted to do it. As the kids grew up, he still took good care of all of us. (My first husband, the Father of my kids, SUCKED, that is why I made him my X.) I like many parents, found out that I had found out that I had a pregnate teen age daughter (two in my case) to care for and their babys. My husband stepped right in and changed diapers, gave them bottles and even got up in the middle of the nights and took care of the babys. He still does care for the babys even though they are now 12 years old. Me on the other hand, I am still working 8 to 12 hours a day to keep up with the growing costs of catholic school, clothing and food. If we both didn’t have an income we would be out on the streets. I think i am an extremly lucky person to have found such a great husband. I have been on both sides of the coin and I will never go back to the first who didn’t care about anything but his self. My friends all tell me what a saint I found in my husband, I only wish more men were still out there for all our daughters to get married to.
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