stephanie Coontz is the author of "The Way We Never Were" and the recently published "The Way We Really Are" (Basic Books, 238 pages), two books that explore the myths and realities of American families. Coontz is a sociologist at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Salon spoke with her recently.

Why do you think the media is suddenly so obsessed with kids and working mothers, with cover stories in two major newsweeklies in the same week?

On the one hand, I think they are appealing to some legitimate concerns. We have this 24-hour turbocharged economy, and it is hard to sustain commitments of any kind in it. And at the same time, our caregiving commitments are growing. Because government and employers have pushed more of the costs of raising kids onto families, the number of households which have major time responsibilities for aging parents has tripled in the last decade, to one out of every four households. So there is an awful lot of stress and tension and juggling going on.

But I think that whether intentionally or not, these stories, particularly the U.S. News & World Report one, are aimed right at the hearts of working women and implicitly endorse a stopgap, short-term solution that is not family-friendly, one that will not help kids. That is the notion that women should quit work for a few years after childbirth. You say in the book that kids who have working moms and kids who don't fare pretty much the same. Is that correct?

Yes. The research is overwhelming. A new national study on child care found that if a woman starts out insensitive to her child, then if the child is in child care for more than 10 hours a week or in child care where there is a big turnover of caregivers, that tends to intensify insecurity and weaken attachment. But you are still talking about two risks interacting there. In those cases, I think that it would be appropriate to tell the mother -- but why was it only the mother that they asked about? -- or rather the parents to spend some more time with their kids. In other cases, though, when the child care is of high or even medium quality, you are talking about variations between kids that are minuscule. Only 1 percent of the difference that they find can be attributed to child care. So this has been very much blown out of proportion.

How do researchers differentiate between mediocre care and excellent care?

Well, there are some things that almost all researchers agree on. Excellent care is where there is a lot of talking and interaction with the children, where they are not just farmed out to watch TV or to play on their own. And there is high continuity of caregivers. Children are perfectly capable of attaching to one, two or even three people, but they have to have some continuity, so a high turnover is a problem. But child care is always done as a footnote in these stories. Since we know that high-quality child care can actually improve kids' lives, why are we not spending more time talking about how to get such high-quality child care, rather than talking about whether women, and it is always women, are kidding themselves about balancing work and family?

Have you found any negative effects on women who do stay home?

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Sometimes staying home is obviously the appropriate thing to do. It is not always the best thing to do right after childbirth; it may be that you find that you need to stay home when your child is 1 or 2, or you may need to cut back when your child is a teenager. It is really more a matter of cutting back than it is quitting work entirely. First of all, new research shows that while a (male) breadwinner, female-homemaker family was quite stable during the 1950s and 1960s, in today's world, where most women have considerable work experience before they get married and before they have children, after marriage, the sudden backsliding into traditional gender roles is extremely disorienting to families. The woman gets quite depressed, she doesn't feel that she has access to the outside world and status in the outside world; she doesn't feel that she has as much leverage in non-child-rearing decisions. And she is quite right in feeling that, because studies show that families tend to be more egalitarian when there is an equal contribution to income. So she gets depressed.

Meanwhile her husband, who has also changed his expectations and really would like to be more involved in child care, and has had the experience of having a co-provider wife, often takes on more hours at work, gets excluded from the child rearing, and he says, "Well what is she depressed about? I am the one making the sacrifices, why isn't she more grateful?" Researchers are finding that this can sow the seeds of conflict that eventually are causes of divorce, in some instances.

Did you find any evidence of this in your research?

Yes, I get lots of stories about this backfiring. Women finding that staying at home caused a lot of conflict in their marriage, women who would say for months or years, "I have to sacrifice for my kid." A red flag goes up for me when I hear people talk about "sacrificing" for their kid in that particular way. Not because I don't think you should put your kids first; I really do. But when people really feel that they are sacrificing by staying home, they are not necessarily doing their child a favor. The research shows that people feel better about themselves and have more patience to engage in good parenting when they're feeling good about their roles, whatever those roles might be.

There is a trade-off. If you go back to work, yes, you are more likely to be harried, you are more likely to have some conflicts with your husband over housework and child care. But those conflicts can also pay off, because the best predictor of whether a man does housework and child care is not his own ideology but the pressure from his wife. Men do more and better child care when their wives are not there to take over for them. Some women really set themselves up, when they stay home, as gatekeepers. They treat their husbands as unskilled assistants. They don't give their husbands the right to make the mistakes and learn their own way.

And of course, the other side of it is that quitting work reinforces the wife's pre-existing social disadvantage in the labor market. That has real long-range implications. Very few of us can afford to quit work entirely for the entire time that our kids are being raised. For example, college tuition costs have tripled. You usually need two incomes when your kid is a teenager, and you may need more flextime. If you don't have a track record at your job, then you don't have the clout and experience to get that flexibility, then you have to quit again. Who is going to quit? It's the woman because her income is already set in this low pattern. Who is going to quit when the parents or the in-laws need help? It's the woman. The result is that, and this to me is a stunning statistic, only 9 percent of women aged 40 or over can expect retirement benefits from their jobs, because of this pattern of interrupted work.

Speaking of flextime, in her new book, "The Time Bind," Arlie Hochschild puts forth the hypothesis that even people who are lucky enough to have access to flextime, both men and women, choose not to use it, partly because they feel that their career won't advance as quickly if they don't have enough "face time" with their bosses. She goes on to say that men and women increasingly find the workplace to be sort of a respite, in the way the home used to be. The paradigms have been turned around, because home is such an unstructured, crazy place to be.

Well, Arlie Hochschild interviewed workers at one firm. I am sure there is a kernel of truth in her findings, but I would have two problems with the conclusions that other people are drawing from them. I am not sure she is drawing them herself. One is that family-friendly benefits like flextime are mostly cosmetic, and most workers know they are. It is not irrational of them to fear that their supervisors will count them as being less dedicated. Study after study that shows that both men and women who even inquire about parental leave begin to be earmarked as not really committed.

The other part of the argument, that work, not home, is the haven, seems to me a very exceptional situation. I do not think it is typical that most people are using the job as a place to escape from home. To the extent that they are, it is not because we have chosen the job over the home. It is that the job has made the home so hard, that it has made it a very difficult place to live, even though we would like to live there. Work demands are so great that they destabilize family life. Many, many people have very tense relations at work right now, especially with all the downsizing that has been going on. Forced overtime is increasing for unionized employees, and off-the-books overtime is increasing for non-unionized employees. We have fewer vacation days now than we did back in 1970, and lower health benefits. These lead to tremendous resentments at work. And so what people do when they get to work, is to take it out on their employers by using e-mail for personal kinds of correspondence. It is unbelievable how much wasted time goes on because people are angry at their employers and frustrated at home. So putting the onus on the individual gets it wrong way around. What are the effects of all of this overload, this juggling between work and home, on a child?

We've gone from a time when the kid had the mother all over them -- in a way that was not always healthy -- to a time when mothers are somewhat distracted, because they have more work going on. But I have talked to so many kids of 1950s families who said, "I spent very little time with my mom. She spent a lot of time housecleaning, but she didn't spend any more time talking to me than I spend talking to my kids." And the other trade-off is that men are spending much more time with their children than they did in the 1950s. So I do not see this as an insurmountable problem, I see it as a different set of stresses. I certainly am all in favor of turning off the beepers and the faxes and putting the phone on busy and not looking at your e-mail, when you get home. I think it is important to carve out, not quality time, but uninterrupted time. Often the best uninterrupted time is that which comes about in the course of doing chores together -- it is not sitting down face to face to have these long talks. Washing the dishes together -- I am in favor of that. Taking a bath -- kids are apt to give their best confidences when you are giving them a bath, or halfway reading the newspaper, and only partly paying attention to them, or doing a chore together, rather than when you just get right in their face, and say, "Confide in me!"

Even if mothers and children weren't interacting so much during the 1950s and 1960s when women were at home more, isn't there a psychological benefit for a child to just have mom around, whether she is talking to you or not? Is there a way that makes a child feel safer?

I think children need to feel safe. They need to know that there are adults in their world who care about them and are checking up on them, but I don't think that it always has to be the mother, or that it even has to be a combination of just the father and mother. One of the real losses for kids in some middle-class communities is the loss of neighborhood and community, where you could go out and you didn't rely on your own parents to be the only ones around. Throughout the vast majority of human history, exclusive and full-time child care by mothers has been totally exceptional. The co-provider family was the norm in colonial days, and in medieval history -- siblings or somebody else had to take care of the younger children.

I don't espouse the "it takes a village" approach because I think that it's as romanticized as the 1950s (nuclear family). We do not live in villages anymore. The real issue is that we have to make a village or make a community. We have to think in terms of the way we design our cities, the way we design our houses, the kind of social space that we reserve, whether we allow affluent people to withdraw into their private schools and gated communities. We have to rethink our work and school schedules to make them less conflictual with family life. People thought the world would end when the union movement demanded the 40-hour week. With our technology, there is no reason that we couldn't have a 30- or 35-hour week. Everybody says that that is an unreasonable demand. To my mind it is an unreasonable demand to ask that individual women shoulder all the burdens of caregiving in today's modern world. I think it is more reasonable to say that we have to adjust our housing and our work expectations and our child-care opportunities.

A lot of media attention seems to be focused on the "plague" of absent dads. Are kids without fathers, whose parents are divorced or who are raised by single moms, that much worse off?

No. This has been HUGELY exaggerated. Do not misunderstand me: I think that there are obvious stresses involved with raising a child alone. But a lot of women raise children alone, even when they have a father in the home. The key is: Do you have two cooperating parents, who are both involved with the children and respectful of each other? That is the ideal situation. And there are plenty of times when, in the absence of that ideal situation, a kid will be better off after a divorce.

Let me give you a couple of examples. When there is high conflict in a home, we know for sure that the kids are better off if their parents do not stay together. Some of the other instances are very close calls. For example, even when there is low conflict, but you have a disengaged father, we find that teens in two-parent families with disengaged fathers have lower self-esteem than either teens in two-parent families where the father is engaged or teens in one-parent families. Because the divorce gives the kid the excuse to say, "Well, Dad's not involved with me because he can't get along with Mom." Whereas the one who has the disengaged Dad who is still in the home doesn't have that excuse. Similarly, we find that the men who are unhappy with their wives have a tremendous spill-over with the way they treat their daughters. So although divorce may be traumatic for such young women, they may end up better in the long run, in terms of their self-confidence and achievement, than having a father around who is belittling them. I am not trying to say that people should run out and get divorced, but I am saying we know that it is far too complex a situation for anyone to have the arrogance to play God about telling people what they should do.

Are there any government policies that you see as truly family-friendly, that aren't just rhetoric?

There are some being talked about, but they are being talked about too timidly. What we need is a major new campaign, much along the lines of the Progressive movement's campaign at the turn of the century, to make family issues a health and safety issue, in terms of national regulations, guidelines and investment. It is a health and safety issue to make sure that parents can take time off without having to give up their jobs entirely. We should have laws that prohibit forced overtime, where you can sue an employer who prevents you from taking time off. We should have laws such as Sweden's that allow any caregiver (not just parents but caretakers of people with Alzheimer's) to drop down to three-quarters time -- with a cut in pay, of course, but not to lose health benefits and not to lose seniority. We have to do something about our ludicrous family leave policy -- it covers less than 50 percent of the workers, and it is unpaid. It is for wealthy people only, and for those who work for big corporations only. The maximum of leave that you are allowed under the act is smaller than the minimum amount of leave in all of our European counterparts. And we have to invest in quality child care. Child care is not good. We must make it better. That should be a major campaign, unless you think that kids are less important than inspecting meat and regulating airline safety.

The failure of liberals to confront these issues head-on has left the right wing in charge of not just the dialogue, but the very language, so that it does get posed in terms of "family values." I was on tour in East Texas a few months ago, I was on a panel, and the first 10 minutes of questions were all about family values. Instead of just saying, "You are wrong," I said, "Tell me more, what does it mean in your life?" and after 10 minutes, we were all agreeing. So, it's a sentiment that is a mile wide but only an inch deep. Our politicians don't have the courage to dig below that inch -- in fact, they prefer to keep it at that shallow level.

The U.S. News article cited a 1997 poll in which 75 percent of 950 adults said moms with kids under 3 who work outside the home are threatening family values.

You know these polls change from day to day depending on how they're phrased. If you phrase the question, "Are women who work neglecting their kids?" the overwhelming majority will say no. In many cases, because it is the only vocabulary people have to express their concern, they'll use the conservative term "family values," but when you press people on what they mean by that, they'll define it in a totally different way than the right wing does. The public defines it in terms of teaching your kids to look beyond the family. They define it in terms of reaching out to get involved in community activities. Whereas the right-wing definition of family values is extraordinarily narrow -- even in terms of the history of Christianity. Christ was quite anti-family. He said that family bonds can interfere with your commitment to the larger Christian community. And the early evangelicals took pains to always talk about the Christian household, to indicate that you had to reach beyond the narrow, selfish ties of sexual attraction and the narcissistic ties of blood in order to look out for the larger community.