Sympathy for the SAHM

~ Laura

Why do women stay at home with their kids? Because the work world is crazy. 

From Judith Shulevitz: 

To understand why female lawyers, doctors, bankers, academics, high-tech executives and other, often expensively pedigreed, professionals quit work to stay home, you need not search their souls for ambivalence or nostalgia. In fact, searching their souls guarantees that you won’t get the story, because it’s not to be found in individual decisions and personal stories, which are always complicated and hard to parse, but in the structural realities of the American workplace. And by this I don’t just mean the family-unfriendly policies of the kind Marissa Mayer is accused of advancing—though refusing to let workers telecommute doesn’t help, and let’s not even talk about how few American companies have on-site child care or adequate parental leave. I mean that among the professional and managerial classes, success at work requires more hours in the office, more hours on the computer at home, more trips out of town, and a much less predictable schedule than it did in Betty Friedan’s day. The life of a Joan or a Peggy at an advertising agency looks almost easy by comparison.

Published by Laura

9 thoughts on “Sympathy for the SAHM”

  1. Thank you for the article. Much better than Lenore Skenazy’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. Of the latter, well, “you can miss it if you try.”

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  2. O, I liked Lenore Skenazy’s piece. (She was a friend of mine, many years ago, in New Haven.) I agree with her that many parents today spend too much time on child-rearing. Kids do fine on their own, mostly, so long as you supply love and affection and clear ground rules.
    Of course, most of our friends are two career couples who practice the traditional style of distant WASP parenting, so I am really talking about OTHER people, not us and our friends, the people we don’t hang out with, but observe sarcastically from afar. They are the crazy helicopter parents.

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  3. I think the whole “helicopter parents” meme is disguised class warfare. Oh, and misogyny–I’ve never heard the tag attached to a father in the “crazy helicopter parents” stories. “Hockey dad” comes closest, but that’s a category unto itself.
    I could point fingers at “helicopter parents.” I’m a WASP who’s sent children to boarding school. It’s easy to say, “oh, they HOVER so much,” when I know I am able to protect and educate my children. If I don’t face their challenges, I shouldn’t feel free to make fun of them. It shouldn’t be necessary to criticize other parents for doing their best for their children. But then, the elite have always liked to criticize the middle class, haven’t they?
    From Skenazy’s opinion piece, I’m not convinced she knows any helicopter parents. She deduces their existence from Dr. Oz and Parenting Magazine? Really? Her evidence is that advertisers try to sell products by inculcating anxiety in customers? Well, that’s only been happening since very first advertisement. One could as accurately conclude Americans are obsessed with bad breath and toe fungus.

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  4. I echo the workplace is crazy problem, and the issue for me is that we’re keeping up with multiple schedules, so scheduling a work meeting is no longer just, Am I free, but am I free and are the kids taken care of, and if not, can the husband deal with them and if not, then I’m going to have to reschedule and will I have to explain why and is that going to affect some aspect of my work life and maybe it might affect the husband’s less so can I get him to pick up the kids instead.. Yes, that’s a runon sentence on purpose because that’s what life feels like as a working parent.

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  5. Interesting about the class implications of hovering/helicoptering. I’ve definitely heard parents of college students justify hovering by saying: We are spending money WE don’t even have on this education. It is our whole family’s investment and we can’t afford to lose it. IT’s too important to entrust to a child.
    BUt here I don’t blame the parents as much as I blame the insanely high tuitions. I also think the solution is to let your kids mature a bit before they try college, if this is the case — or to let them do a couple of years of community college first. Not to attempt to do college on their behalf.
    I’ve also heard parents justify writing their kid’s college admissions essays, along with applying for scholarships for them, using the same language. It’s too important to entrust it to the child — so yeah the barriers get fuzzy.
    However, I think this is a separate issue than parents literally wanting to spend every minute of every day with their children, even though both are called helicoptering. (In my experience, it’s often parents who are high-level executives who don’t spend a lot of time with their children that do attempt to do college for their kids.) Perhaps we need two different terms to sort out the differences between time-intensive parenting and controlling parenting.
    BTW I thought Lenore Skenazy’s article was hysterical — reminded me of Erma Bombeck!

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  6. Also, I thought I’d mention this: I recently spend some time with an Israeli academic who told me that Israeli parents just kind of assume that their kids will be kids, doing the kind of asinine, immature things that kids do — throughout high school. Then everybody goes to the army for two years where they are forced to grow up and mature. Then it’s apparently quite common for these young adults to do some kind of one-year university prep/make up for all the farting around you did in high school course, and then apply to university. He was singing the praises of this system, which definitely seems preferable to sitting on a 15 year old trying to force them to care about AP Human Geography.

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  8. Here’s a great piece that explores this more: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/13/03/the-many-myths-about-mothers-who-opt-out/274354/
    This is where the dominant SAH rhetoric drives me batty and is damaging: it either 1) undercuts the argument that SAH parenting is a freely chosen option (and as a feminist, I want to break down the barriers to free choices as much as possible) or 2) suggests that SAHPs are doing something no one else is doing: choosing among options, and de facto rejecting some options. As Penelope Trunk said in the post you recently linked to, we need to own our choices. And we’re all making sacrifices – we just do our own individual, unique calculus regarding them.

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  9. Yes, Abby. I feel like I dealt with this topic years ago on this blog, but maybe it’s worth re-stating.
    All parents, those who end up working full time, those who end up working PT, those who end up as a SAHP, are not making full and free decisions. It’s not like picking out shoes — flats or pumps. These decisions about family and work life are very complicated. As a parent of a special needs kid, the range of options are even more limited.
    However we get to that final arrangement (not that these things are really final, but whatever), we have to just own it. There are great things about working full time. And there are great things about being home full time. For sanity purposes, it’s not terribly healthy to harp on the negatives.

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