Saturday, May 12, 2012

For Mother's Day, Can We Get Over the 3-Year-Old Eating and Get to the Real Issues?

There is a lot of discussion and debate going on this Mother's Day weekend about the Time magazine cover that shows a young, attractive mom breastfeeding a preschool-aged child.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/time-cover-milks-shocking-image-photo/2012/05/10/gIQAOd8qFU_blog.html  I admit I have not read the content of the article yet and I suspect many of the people commenting on it haven't either.  But I couldn't go into Mother's Day this year without commenting.  For me, the debates about how long and how publicly a woman should breastfeed and whether or not the mom in the photo should have allowed her son's face to be visible are missing the more important issues.  Leaving aside for a minute that as a society we would find an image of a mother breastfeeding to be so shocking and controversial, some writers are working toward moving past judgement.  See for example: 


"Our job as parents isn't to judge. Our job is to love and protect our children. To clothe and feed and snuggle them. The next time you feel compelled to say something snarky about another human's parenting, maybe go give your kids a hug instead, because those are the kids that are your business."  from http://gogozen.blogspot.com/2012/05/youre-doing-it-right.html?spref=fb&fb_source=message 


Kelly offers some great perspective on ending judgement of moms by moms.  The problem, however, is that there are broader institutional challenges for mothers that are glossed over when we focus on what some consider to be parenting extremes.  Firstly, I am wondering if there is acknowledgement in the article about which parents are even able to consider following the practices of attachement parenting.  This is the same thing that drives me crazy about all those celebrity mothers who immediately lose the baby weight and then are lauded for it in the media.  Of course they lost the baby weight and look fantastic.  They have support networks their wealth and position can provide!  They can afford macrobiotic (or whatever) meals made by professional chefs and aren't depending on the time and money budgets of a more average mom to sustain their families (time to prepare meal = 5 minutes while baby naps, budget for meal = tuna casserole).  


Secondly, many families do not have the luxury of depending on one income so that that the other parent (if there is another parent) can focus so much time and effort on childcare.  Also, despite recent trends in stay-at-home dad-ing, when we talk about attachment parenting, the focus is often on what moms are doing or not doing or should be doing.  Culturally then, we are still imagining a gendered breadwinner/homemaker family model that was really only statistically true for a decade or so in the 20th century.  Well, this is the cultural ideal if you are heterosexual and middle class anyway.  Working class women have a longer history of balancing income-generating work and household duties because their income was necessary to meet basic cost of living needs.  Modern welfare policies in the U.S. reflect this class differentiation in parenting ideals by requiring benefit recipients to seek employment.


Despite an overall increase in the employment rates of women with young children over the latter half of the 20th century, work by sociologist Arlie Hoschild suggests that women are more likely than their male partners to reduce work hours after the birth of children. The "Second Shift" phenomenon, in which women face a disproportionate burden of house and care work, leads them to rely on flexible work hours or shifting to part-time work as a way to do it all.  Recent discussions about the cost to women of breastfeeding their children (http://news.yahoo.com/hidden-cost-breast-feeding-revealed-114941470.html) in the context of a persistant gender wage gap may partially explain the propensity of women in male-female partnerships to reduce out-of-the home work hours after the birth of children.  Differences in the rate of pay between men and women may also in part be due to the fact that jobs that women gravitate to are paid less on average.  Whether women enter jobs with lower pay and more flexible hours in part because they realize they will face family-workplace conflicts in the future is a broader issue that we miss with the so-called divisive "Mommy Wars."  


Finally, there is what sociologist Shelley Correll and her research partners have labeled "The Motherhood Penalty."  The researchers found that in matched pairs of resumes where other variables were held constant, women presented as mothers were rated as less committed and competent with respect to their careers (than women without children) and  offered lower starting salaries.  Fatherhood, on the other hand, was a benefit for men.  Men presented as fathers were offered higher starting salaries compared to men who were not presented as fathers.  Correll and her partners argue that cultural expectations about women as mothers are inconsistent with our expectations of who competent, committed workers are.  Gender inequality is reproduced through stereotyping and remains pervasive.


As mothers we want to do right by our children.  Doing so means that as a society we support mothers, fathers, and caregivers by respecting the fact that care work IS work.  It also means ensuring a living wage for families and adequate health care.  We can take a step in the right direction by not allowing the media to push us into defensive positioning.  This Mother's Day, let's support all people who contribute to the care and education of children whether they practice attachement parenting or not and whether they are biologically mothers or not.  Let's keep in mind the more important issues that affect the lives of parents and children and not lose focus because of an image of a breast in a child's mouth.  


(I look forward to updating this post after I've read the text of the article.)


  

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