I surf around pretty broadly on a daily basis. I read the major papers. I call Steve to find out what he's read. I check out my RSS feeds, which contain everything from wonky policy stuff to academic nonsense to mom stuff to gossip. I like to get the wide spectrum of what everyone is talking about. Sometimes everybody is on the same page. Sometimes you get weird clashes.
The weird clash of the afternoon started with Stephanie Coontz op-ed piece on how kids ruin your marriage. I'm not sure where she was going with this piece. Maybe her point was don't have them. She seems to have a grudge against committed, hetero relationships and their spawn.
From there, I flipped to Dooce's monthly newsletter to her daughter. Dooce talks about how her daughter changed her life for the better.
morning that altered my life so drastically that sometimes it still
feels like I'm catching my breath. I imagine that I won't ever stop
feeling this way, won't ever stop having a portion of my brain
dedicated to the thought of where you are and what you're doing, won't
ever be able to escape the constant, nagging hope that you are happy
and fulfilled. My pulse is forever closer to the surface of my neck
because of you, because of my responsibility toward you, and I can't
thank you enough for the dimension that this has added to what it means
to be alive.
Wouldn't it be great to get those two in a room together and have them fight it out?
Apt. 11d 
So funny you should mention the Coontz piece; I had just read it and totally didn’t have your reaction to it. Coontz pointedly talks about the fact that problems arise when couples end up parents without really intending to, or when they’re not both on board with the whole thing. This to me was not surprising. It really didn’t seem like a “grudge against committed, hetero relationships”.
LikeLike
That was just poor writing on my part. This article was kind of a “no. duh.” I was guessing at her hidden meaning based on other stuff that she has written.
LikeLike
Stephanie Coontz is married and has a son, according to The New York Times. So if she really does have a grudge against hetero, committed, child-producing relationships, her behavior contradicts her own professed views.
As for your description of the tone of her column as “nasty,” I honestly don’t see it.
Coontz points to a study that shows that the quality of a marriage can decline after a child is born, under certain conditions:
— If both parents were ambivalent about having children.
— If the parents disagreed “about whether or when to conceive, with one partner giving in for the sake of the relationship.”
— If the parents didn’t plan the conception.
But she also notes this finding, from the same study: “Couples who planned or equally welcomed the conception were likely to maintain or even increase their marital satisfaction after the child was born.”
Coontz goes on to point out studies that show that parents are spending much more time with their kids today than they did in 1965, and that they “found some of these extra hours by cutting back on time spent in activities where children were not present — when they were alone as a couple, visiting with friends and kin, or involved in clubs.”
Then she wraps up the column by declaring that couples need time alone, lest, after their kids grow up and leave home, “they cannot recover the relationship that made them want to have children together in the first place.”
I don’t think the viewpoint expressed in this column is 180 degrees from that expressed in Dooce’s newsletter. But I’d like to hear more about what’s driving your take on Coontz’s column.
LikeLike
I don’t know if I saw the Coontz piece as “nasty.” I think the observation that having kids probably hurt marriages where the couple hadn’t planned on having kids are were ambivalent seems pretty on the dot to me. Kids are a lot of work and there is NO WAY to know what being a parent is really like until you are one. The main message I took away was that you shouldn’t have kids if you aren’t sure about it–always a good message.
That said, I think children have strengthened my marriage in some ways–the shared joy my husband and I have in them and the shared struggle of being in it together when the kids are less than joyful. But it has also REALLY heightened my awareness of gender inequality in parenting, and sometimes that really makes me mad at my husband and the world.
LikeLike
Yeah, totally agree. Having kids really made me aware of gender inequality in parenting and it took a lot to work out those wrinkles in the relationship. I agree with Coontz’s point that kids do take a toll on a marriage. You have to schedule date nights and all that. But it’s just a Dr. Phil observation that I was looking for something else.
I haven’t read her book, but I always read her op-eds for the Times. She seems to have an agenda.
LikeLike
OK. Took out the word, nasty.
LikeLike
“Marital quality also tends to decline when parents backslide into more traditional gender roles. Once a child arrives, lack of paid parental leave often leads the wife to quit her job and the husband to work more. This produces discontent on both sides. The wife resents her husband’s lack of involvement in child care and housework. The husband resents his wife’s ingratitude for the long hours he works to support the family”
Yep, yep, yep.
I do think having children has made our marriage different, more challenging. Honestly, the kids just seem “in the way” some of the time. I think it’s difficult when you don’t have reliable babysitters or good cash flow to go out on a regular basis to renew the relationship. I’d love to go on a trip alone with my husband, but have no idea what I’d do with the kids. The nearest relative is 9 hours away. But I’ve been thinking about it. The grandparents have offered, and we may just have to work that out this summer. Cause I can’t wait for an empty nest to get some serious quality time with my spouse.
LikeLike
As a divorce/custody lawyer, I spend a lot of time on issues related to parenting. I am also sensitive to these issues as someone who has his children 50 percent of the time. (sensitive meaning I get angry when people assume that women are the better parents)
It isn’t very enlightening for me to say that both within and without the marriage there is tremendous pressure for the mother to stay home and the father to go to work. However, the couple has a great deal of power with regard to how they deal with it.
I know of a fair number of situations where the wife feels very strongly about staying home and the husband wants a more equal situation with work and home responsibilities. There is a lot of pressure on the man not to fight that battle.
Eh, I’m not sure what I want to say other than that kids add sleep deprivation, financial stress, discipline disagreements, and a host of other worries to a relationship.
LikeLike
Her “Marriage, a History” book is really interesting. Gives you the long view, seemed to have an agenda of overcoming the modern view that the 50s marriage is the norm. It’s worth picking up.
I agree with Miranda that no one should have kids if they’re not sure. I find myself giving this advice all the time, and I think it stuns people. As if I were saying I don’t love kids, or somehow regret my choices. That’s not it at all. It’s just a lot of work, and to a great extent it transforms your fun-loving couples lifestyle into something more akin to running a small non-profit together.
In that way recommending parenting reminds me of cases where a friend has asked me if they should apply for a job at my employer. I work in a pretty hard-driving environment that is not for the faint of heart. I love it, I find it challenging and rewarding. But I don’t recommend it to many of my friends. Not everyone is up to the stress; not everyone could meet the expectations for intensity and brainpower. And so it is with parenting — I can’t recommend it to everyone.
LikeLike
Another quick thought:
Without going into detail, I am more capable of having my children full-time than my ex-wife.
However, it would never occur to me to do anything other than 50-50. Yet, I think many women are viewed as failures if they do not have at least 50-50 custody of their children.
I recently read (maybe here?) that part of feminism is expanding the roles and opportunities for both women AND men. I agree completely.
LikeLike
The Way We Never Were is great, too. Coontz’s son must be an adult by now. When I’ve seen her speak she has spoken lovingly of spouse and son, and doesn’t seem to have an axe to grind (in fact the first time she talked about how much she had learned from listeners calling in on right wing talk shows to be hostile to her ideas, but finding a lot of common ground).
LikeLike
So, what is Coontz saying here? That kids take a toll on a marriage? Yeah. I know that. I can look at my RSS feed and find 60 mom blogs who say the same thing, but then add that they really like their kids a lot or something else to the picture. Why does this deserve op-ed space in the NYT?
Is it really surprising to anyone in 2009 that kids aren’t the fountain of all joy?
I’m not even sure about all the facts in this article. I was just browsing around and found a Salon article where Arlie Hochschild cites surveys that kids want to spend more time with their parents.
LikeLike
OK, well now I’ve had time to read the article. I think what she is saying is this: you put your marital happiness at risk if you have children unless you are both pretty keen to have children. You also put it at risk if you adopt strict gender roles. So, it is an argument for couples to be of one mind about childbearing if they are going to go ahead with it, and the collaborate with each other in a somewhat egalitarian way in the actual rearing of them. These both seem unsurprising. The first point, though, is obscured by the recent literature that says that marital quality declines after childbirth, because that literature has not been disaggregating types of couples.
On the facts. It is true that parents spend more time with their kids now than in the past, but it is also true that children and parents both want more time with each other than they have. If you dig into the data, it turns out that parents spend very little un-preoccupied time with their kids, and kids resent the fact that their parents are with them but stressed and angry and preoccupied (we’re not talking infants and toddlers here, but school-age kids and teenagers). SO it does all fit together. (Jane Waldfogel, What Children Need (Harvard UP 2006?) sythesises all this research brilliantly)
I imagine that what gets it space is 1) the report of the new, demystifying, study and 2) that Coontz is Coontz. Better than anything I;ve read by Maureen Dowd, who’s in every week. I think you’re being too hard on her.
LikeLike
“I think you’re being too hard on her.” Could be. I threw my back out on Monday and I’ve been cranky all week. But she consistently irks me, because she packages up trite observations as edgy, academic truths. I hate people who portray themselves as myth busters. They are way too predictable.
“The first point, though, is obscured by the recent literature that says that marital quality declines after childbirth, because that literature has not been disaggregating types of couples.” That point is interesting, but coontz doesn’t set up the article to make that point. She sets up to repudiate the myth that kids make us complete. (Who actually believes that anymore?)
Whatever. Back pain. Cranky.
LikeLike
I thought Coontz was trying to explain precisely why someone like Heather Armstrong can wax rhapsodic about her daughter even as study after study shows that overall, marital satisfaction falls after the birth of a child. The new study may strike us all as obvious, but then again, a lot of parenting/family research does tend to do that.
I also believe that Armstrong’s letters to her daughter are a public performance, as all blog writing is to a greater or lesser degree. Plus, the monthly letters are specifically meant to celebrate the child — their content differs from the regular entries, don’t they?
I don’t read Dooce regularly, but I believe that Armstrong was hospitalized in the first year of her daughter’s life due to PPD. If I had been through such a traumatic beginning, I would probably take extra delight in the world of motherhood I found “on the other side,” too. I would probably feel that way even if I weren’t writing all those letters to my daughter in front of the largest parenting-blogger audience in the USA.
LikeLike
As for the fight, when there’s a verb form “Coontzed”, there might be a contest. Until then, not.
LikeLike
Harry B writes “and the collaborate with each other in a somewhat egalitarian way in the actual rearing of them.”
The problem with that, at least once you get to jobs requiring a certain level of expertise, is that two people working 40 hours a week often make less than one person working 60-70 hours a week, especially after you add in the extra cost of childcare and whatnot for the first family. It doesn’t apply in every case, but specialization really does generally lead to higher gains.
LikeLike
I don’t see that there is a contradiction between Armstrong and Coontz. Coontz says that having kids hurts marital quality, and Armstrong expresses her love for her daughter in rhapsodic, quasi-romantic terms. It’s easy to see how a husband could lose his place in his wife’s affection, particularly since he isn’t as rosy and delicious as an infant.
LikeLike
That ‘new infant smell’ is hard to beat.
LikeLike
MH is right that our current economy actively punishes families who try to live in an egalitarian way. It’s the whole “ideal worker” thing — businesses gain when they can talk people into having their spouse stay home and pick up the slack.
One big take-away for me from the article is that, if it’s true that marital quality declines when partners are forced to take on strict gender roles, then our current tax and employment policies are not just anti-woman but effectively anti-marriage. (This is something BTW that I’ve long believed.) I would love to see that get broader play. Because being anti-woman clearly hasn’t been enough to make anybody change anything.
LikeLike
MH — yes, I didn’t mean to imply that the choice is an easy one to make, and for many its just impossible. I agree with jen. I am not (here) proposing any solution! But when I talk with students about these issues (which I do a lot because I teach philosophy courses with some focus on family/marriage/childhood issues) many of them — especially the women — really seem to have bought into a kind of “we can have it all” ideology, which means that they approach planning and decision making in incredible ignorance of the trade-offs they will face (and, I’ll add, incredible ignorance of the level of commitment the boys they marry will have to traditional gender roles — I have a clever trick for enlightening them about that which, now I think of it, I ought to post at CT).
LikeLike
No, Harry, tell us now, here. We want to know!
LikeLike
I think what she is saying is this: you put your marital happiness at risk if you have children unless you are both pretty keen to have children. You also put it at risk if you adopt strict gender roles.
I agree with you–and, therefore, with Coontz–on the first point, Harry; I disagree with you–or at least would demand a major caveat–on the second point. “Marital happiness” is a hugely vague and variable confluence of nigh-uncountable subjective factors, so I hesitate to weigh in on a topic which is already as tenuous as this one is, but I’ll try: “strict gender roles” can serve as a source of contentment, security, trust, and peace of mind, for those people who for whatever reason (usually though not always a religious one) do not make egalitarian arrangements between husband and wife a priority, assuming they even believe such an arrangement to be possible. Hence, if you and your spouse of a conservative religious disposition, or if you and your spouse simply do not believe in, or at least are willing to take a chance on rejecting, assumptions about the genders which minimize their supposed natural and/or dispositional differences, then adopting “strict gender roles” would not necessarily put your marital happiness as risk; it could actually be a boon to your marriage.
The obvious qualification here is that we all–thankfully!–live in a world where the values of equality and democracy are widely acknowledged, and so finding oneself in a relationship where such religious imperatives or conscious acts of ideological rejection play a major role is becoming less and less common. I’m happy about that–I’m happy that my wife and I have been able to come up with relatively egalitarian arrangement, at least in comparison with many of our fellow believers. (Melissa was just telling me this morning about a playgroup yesterday where she, once again, found herself tagged as the radical feminist for insisting that our daughters will get enough education to support themselves without a husband if they so desire.) But all of that doesn’t eliminate the fact that I have in fact known couples that have found great happiness through embracing strict gender roles, or have apparently increased their happiness (by every measure I can account for, at least) by embracing such roles more strictly. I would be surprised, Harry, if you couldn’t say the same.
LikeLike
Miranda. Ok, I’ll write it up and post it here (and then, later, there). It’ll take a while though.
Russell — point taken. Marital happiness is measured by subjective happiness-type surveys, and I don’t know exactly how sophisticated they are, but they certainly don’t delve very deeply into people’s foundational beliefs about what to do. Certainly, conservative religious women in the US (the only country I know data on) seem to be more satisfied in their marriages than non-religious, and that probably has something to do with their authentic acceptance of the traditional gender roles that others end up being boxed into. I was just reporting the undisagreggated findings of the social scientists, and of course when you disaggregate you get a lot of variation.
LikeLike
conservative religious women in the US (the only country I know data on) seem to be more satisfied in their marriages than non-religious, and that probably has something to do with their authentic acceptance of the traditional gender roles that others end up being boxed into
There was an interesting ted.com talk on happiness that touches on this issue of acceptance/choice with regard to happiness.
Somewhat related, I am all for people understanding that there are some positive benefits to not having children. There is far too much pressure/expectation that couples should have children.
LikeLike
Laura,
So sorry about your back!
I think Coontz’s article (which I loved, by the way) is a way to respond to several pieces in the parenting media coverage that have hit this week. There was a piece in Parenting about moms being super irritated with their husbands — meaning irate — because of the lack of help around the house. (It was picked up both by the NYT parenting blog and the Post’s.)
The marital happiness bit comes from a piece from Science Times (this week or last), which had a report about marital happiness increasing after children leaving the home — the first (I think) real study that is starting to dismantle the “empty nest syndrome” argument that women get overwhelmed by depression when their children left.
In the end, as a new mom, I find it refreshing that science is coming to the conclusion that parents shouldn’t live their lives solely for their kids. In my daughter’s first year, I read WAY too much about the Sears’ book, stunned in the knowledge that because I was going to work in the evenings while my husband was feeding Amelia — gasp — WITH A BOTTLE — that I was a “detached” parent.
Sorry. Didn’t mean to turn that into a rant. You up for coffee sometime next week?
LikeLike
heh. We like rants on this blog, Julie. Though the fact that I work with your husband makes discussions about useless husbands a little awkward.
Yes, the Sears are super hard core. I quickly dispensed with them. I enjoy sleep too much for co-sleeping. I saw the NYT piece about how angry new moms get w/their husbands. Been there. I just feel like we’ve talked about this so much already, that Coontz’s piece didn’t offer anything new. I thought that Harry, Russell, and others have added more subtlety to the discussion in our little blog than Coontz did in the op-ed piece. But that’s just cranky-girl’s perspective.
Coffee is great. Let’s talk.
LikeLike
Sorry about the back pain. Back pain is the worst.
I would like to read the research behind the statistics that parents spend a lot more time with their kids now than 30 years ago. Almost all the moms I know work part-time or full-time. I suspect that kids are spending less time (relatively) with their mothers, but more with their fathers.
And with all the distractions in our much larger homes these days: internet, HDTV, NPR, Wii….is it possible that we are in the same place, but perhaps not spending time together?
LikeLike
The Sears/AP (attachment parenting) thing is interesting to me. I’m on an e-mail group for women who practice AP and who work (i.e., not fitting in with the idea that AP moms should SAH) and the Coontz article was brought up yesterday and viewed very positively.
Again, maybe this gets to the idea of support networks. I “hang out” online with a bunch of women who support my choices and understand my challenges. I don’t get that kind of support in “real” life. I love my sisters, but they made very different choices, so it’s hard for me to find helpful support with them.
IOW, sometimes we do need to state the obvious because it’s not always obvious.
LikeLike
You’re very kind Laura. Thanks.
Miranda. Here’s the story, which I’ll give in more detail at CT:
The first time I taught about the gendered divsion of labour one very smart girl expressed extreme scepticism that it had any applicability to her generation. And, of course, all the research is on much older people, and there’s none on hers. So I devised the following survey, pretty much on the spot:
1. Are you male, or female. (If you’re not sure, just pick one, if you reject the question, sit out the exercise).
2. During your teen years did you get paid to do babysitting more than 10 times?
3. Do you anticipate having children? If not, sit this out.
Here are three kinds of parenting arrangement.
A) Father led parenting: the father spends substantially more time than the mother looking after the children and thinking about their wellbeing over the course of their childhoods
B) Mother led parenting: the mother spends substantially more time than the father looking after the children and thinking about their wellbeing over the course of their childhoods
C) Egalitarian parenting: the mother and father spend roughly the same amount of time looking after the children and thinking about their wellbeing.
4) Think just about yourself for the moment. Which of A, B, and C best characterizes your expectations for your prospective family life.
5) Now think about your FIVE best friends. Which of A, B, and C best characterizes your expectations for most of their family lives? (eg, you expect 3 or more of them to be Father-led, answer A).
———-
You can guess what the upshot is. The girls mostly think that they will be in egalitarian marriages. The boys mostly think they will be in traditional gender role marriages. The girls find that shocking enough when revealed. But what makes the whole class laugh is that the girls all have exactly the same expectations for their friends as the boys do for themselves; that is, traditional gender roles.
And, you won’t be surprised to know, that more than half the girls babysat a good deal during their teens, and less than 10% of the boys.
It really brings it home to them. What they do with it, who knows.
LikeLike
I was expecting chanting or an e-meter, but your way works.
For me, ‘B’ and ‘C’ both have their little pains in the asses. ‘C’ was the only one that was a conscious choice and the main downside was exhaustion. We were moving to ‘A’ until life made it impossible. So, I guess may point is that I’m unsure how much expectations matter given the stochastic events that drive the employment options that make A, B, or C possible.
Also, I’d be surprised by 10% of the boys having babysat, unless you included immediate family members.
LikeLike
“So, I guess may point is that I’m unsure how much expectations matter given the stochastic events that drive the employment options that make A, B, or C possible.”
Add to the mix that statistic floating around that 82% of recently laid-off workers are men.
LikeLike
Wow, Harry B. That is a pretty clever exercise. Especially about the male/female differentiation in the class.
LikeLike
Thanks for posting this Harry! Can I borrow it to use in my literature of domesticity class?
LikeLike
Harry, a sincere question about question #2 on your quiz: does only being paid in cash count? That is, is the only babysitting that counts for purposes of gender differentiation a babysitting job? I ask because in communities, congregations, neighborhoods, etc., where you have a significant number of families that have some degree of relations to each other (cousins, in-laws, etc.), it’s very common–in my experience, anyway–for babysitting to be shared between families, with older children, male or female, taking responsibility for the younger ones. If there is any compensation for this (and there often is), it’s rarely an established wage, as opposed to a quid pro quo.
The thing is, of course, the majority of said arrangements involve socially and/or religiously conservative parents, and so strict gender roles which privilege the male children tend to be passed on to them as they go on to form their own families. And yet, they would say they did tons of babysitting while growing up.
LikeLike
In a very minor example of how children change everything, I caught a continuity error in an episode of Oswald today. Oswald was pushing a wagon full of junk. He gave a broken rake to the penguin voiced by Squiggy and in the next scene, the rake was back in the wagon. I never used to watch Oswald or catch continuity errors.
LikeLike
MH, you just kill me ded.*
*Fandom expression with positive connotation.
LikeLike
I know all the names of Thomas’ trains, MH. Hey, I should put that in one my 25 random thing meme for facebook.
Y’all to go CT to read Harry’s longer version of his comment and chat there.
LikeLike
We don’t watch much Thomas anymore, thought the trains are still a big hit (we got the table for Christmas). I’ve tried to put all the cars we have into a straight line and measure them, but everytime I do, our son starts moving them. I suppose I could do it when he goes to bed, but that seems like a poor use of rest/work time.
LikeLike
MH — I do include family members, for reasons given in the reply to Russell over at CT. Also, do you (and Laura) know how old Thomas is? When I tell people that my mum used to read them (as a kid) they don’t believe me.
Miranda — and anyone else — please do feel free to use it in whatever context it is relevant to!
I put a long reply to various comments, including Russell’s cross-posted here, at CT. Thanks, Miranda, for prompting me to post it.
LikeLike
“I suppose I could do it when he goes to bed, but that seems like a poor use of rest/work time.”
Oh, come now, it’s a great use of time after the kids are asleep, proof positive that everything changes after kids.
We’re not train people around here, but I did arrange to put all the kid’s stuffed animals on a couch and take a photo. It was horrifying.
LikeLike
HarryB
Then they get divorced and many men take on a greater parenting role.
Clearly, the socialization of babysitting and giving little girls baby dolls to play with carries over into our roles while we are married.
How do you address it? Should it be addressed?
Ill have to come back to ruminate on this topic.
LikeLike
“Clearly, the socialization of babysitting and giving little girls baby dolls to play with carries over into our roles while we are married.”
You can lead a horse to baby dolls, but you can’t make it drink. The toy itself has only so much influence on the style of play the child adopts. We gave our daughter both baby dolls and a train set when she was a toddler. The baby dolls were coldly ignored, despite the fact that they had a variety of fun pink accessories. Instead, she wrapped the various Thomas characters up in blankets and made beds for them. Several years later, her younger brother tenderly cares for two stuffed dragons (they’re father and son). It’s hard to figure out where nature leaves off and nurture begins, but my feeling is that a lot of my son’s socialization has come from his older sister.
LikeLike
I don’t know how to think about the socialisation. We had girls, then a son who is, let’s say, extremely male (he’s 2 1/2 right now, and we are exhausted). The girls (12 and 8 now) are not respecters of any gender boundaries in their own lives (the 8 yr old especially) but are very gender conscious for their brother. But he, despite being full of testoterone, loves playing with dolls, and also loves babies (real ones) which are the only beings around whom he is genuinely calm. But we had to show him how to play with a doll (beyond just hugging and kissing it).
We dress him in boy clothes (because the girls insist and we’ve had some hand-me-downs from a boy) but he often wears pink shoes and a barrette (because he likes to copy them). Outside the home people treat him 100% differently when he has a barrette on than when he doesn’t. There is a lot of socialisation that people choose to ignore as socialisation
So, will, your question is very perplexing to me.
LikeLike
I grew up in a very liberal household.
As a child, I sometimes worked with the younger kids in youth group.
I am now 41. Nobody has ever asked me whether I was going to stay home with the kids. Nobody has ever suggested to me that I am less of a parent because I go to the office every day. Nobody ever asked me if I was going to take home off from being a lawyer when my kids were little. I can only think of one male acquaintance who stays home while his wife goes to work. So I (and my son) have virtually no role models to suggest that staying home might be a profession for the father.
Go read the mom blogs and see the discussions about women who work outside the home and how they feel that they are looked at as sub-par mothers.
If I bring the cupcakes to the school, do the moms in the class snicker and wonder what is wrong with my kids’ mom? Why isn’t she doing these things? If a mom doesn’t have custody of her kids, how many people ask themselves “what is wrong with her? What evil thing has she done?” Do you look at dads the same way?
These not-so-subtle pressures greatly influence the choices that mothers and fathers make.
All of these things play into this very complicated dynamic.
Then, when a couple divorces, the dynamic changes. Each parent has the children by themselves. Suddenly, you are on the stage, forced to be the complete parent.
LikeLike
“(he’s 2 1/2 right now, and we are exhausted)”
Amen to that. I never thought I’d look back on the ‘awake to eat every four hours’ phase as restful, but I really miss all of the sitting down that was possible back when the baby was pretty much going to stay whereever you set him down.
LikeLike
I clearly remember a birthday dinner party for a girlfriend that I attended maybe 15 years ago. There were 8 of us there, all working women in our mid-20s, all single. For some reason the talk turned to a colleague who had quit work to try to get pregnant. We were stunned by this; the idea that you would quit work before you were even pregnant. Our colleague was in her late 20s at the time.
The conversation continued to opinions about working vs. staying at home. Of the group at the table, only one woman (Barb) would consider staying home with her children. After much discussion (and 4+ bottles of wine) it became clear that everyone but Barb had had mothers who were in a silent rage over their traditional gender role.
The result was striking in terms of decisions that we, at 25, had already made. All of us had gone to college, and all of us agreed strongly with the statement, “You should always be able to support yourself, even if you get married.” We were pursuing our careers seriously and were turning down high-maintenance trader-trash type men. (And yes, they were asking.)
Now, 15 years hence, all of us are married and everyone but Barb is in an egalitarian marriage. (No divorces thus far.)
Whether you baby-sit or whatever as a child, is that really as important as what you see in your parents’, siblings’ and friends’ relationships? And don’t think you need a *positive* role model; it’s just as common to look at that horrible brother-in-law and think, oh my god, please let that never happen to me.
LikeLike
“Go read the mom blogs and see the discussions about women who work outside the home and how they feel that they are looked at as sub-par mothers.
If I bring the cupcakes to the school, do the moms in the class snicker and wonder what is wrong with my kids’ mom? Why isn’t she doing these things? If a mom doesn’t have custody of her kids, how many people ask themselves “what is wrong with her? What evil thing has she done?” Do you look at dads the same way?
These not-so-subtle pressures greatly influence the choices that mothers and fathers make.
All of these things play into this very complicated dynamic.”
This is very astute. It’s something I write about a lot, but I think no one completely gets. My husband has been the only dad at many a school event. He’s felt uncomfortable because of it, but still he doesn’t quite see the pressure there is for mothers to perform appropriately. He says to ignore it, but it’s hard to ignore the icy stares that say, “oh, that’s where that mom has been; she works.” I chose to quit a regular paying job in favor of piecing together something, in part, because of that pressure. Some might say I caved, but I’ve been a working parent for 13 years. Maybe I was just freaking tired.
LikeLike