Children

Wednesday, Jun 18, 1997 6:32 PM UTC

i love you both unequally

Nobody tells you that the hardest thing about having a new baby is kicking the old baby out of the nest of your heart.

By Kate Moses

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every pregnant woman awaiting the birth of a second child steels herself for the onslaught to come. Two kids are more than twice as much work, the common wisdom goes, and alongside the hopeful mental images we allow ourselves of enchanted, careful older siblings cuddling “their” babies are the scary pictures of wailing arguments over disputed toys, dinner times disrupted by imagined slights and the logistical nightmare of schlepping six bags of groceries, a stroller (with sleeping child) and a car seat (with hungry infant) from the garage a block and a half away to your apartment three flights up — in the rain.

“It’s hard,” warn our two-plus children friends, and you can see the evidence of how hard it is in the dark circles under their eyes. But why is it that nobody tells you that the hardest part of having more than one child is kicking your older, light-of-your-life, beloved child out of the nest of your heart to make room for a baby?

For reasons obscured by time (perhaps prompted by the familiar question, “Who do you love more — me, the older kid, or the baby?”), my mother once told me that, as the pregnant mother of a toddler, she couldn’t imagine how she could love another baby as much as she loved her firstborn. “But then you were born, and I loved you just as wildly as I loved Billy. And later, when I was pregnant with John, I worried again — how could I have enough love for three? But John arrived, and it seemed that my heart just expanded to make room for him.”

I suppose it’s true that we have an infinite capacity for love, certainly where our children are concerned. But I question whether we have an infinite capacity for the type of passionate, consuming, distilled essence of love that one feels for a baby. The love I felt for my newborn son — that deep, visceral bond, as vivid and tender as heartbreak — was a feeling I retained for nearly eight years. Then his sister arrived and broke the bank of my heretofore ever-expandable heart.

In the months prior to my new baby’s birth, I spent a lot of time thinking about my old baby. Not only was I wistful for the happy seven years I’d spent in undivided loyalty to my one and only child, I was also worried about how a new baby would affect Zachary’s life and his place in our family. Zachary was the fruit of my failed first marriage; my new baby would be his half-sister, technically. Since he was 2, Zachary has shuttled every few days between my home and his father’s. He doesn’t remember his life before his stepfather was in it, and he calls both of the fathers in his life Daddy. As enthusiastically as Zachary had campaigned for a little brother or sister, once he had one, I wondered, would he really be happy? Even when that baby got to stay home with Mom all the time, and he was still shuttling back and forth between houses? Would he feel jealous when his stepfather doted on the baby?

In the weeks just prior to baby Celeste’s arrival, all three of Zachary’s parents quietly plotted to make his transition into brotherhood as secure and untroubled as we could. As summer’s meter ran low and the annual parade of day camps ended, before the start of second grade and the arrival of his little sister, Zachary and I even went away for a week together at the family retreat in the Sierra foothills. It was the week of the Perseid meteor shower, and we planned to sleep on the back porch of the big log cabin and watch the stars fall over our heads. We would walk the creekside trail with our lunches and spend afternoons at the lake, swimming and reading “The Chronicles of Narnia” and trying, dogged despite years of failure, to catch a frog.

Perhaps in part because of the unexpected and painful end of my relationship with his dad, Zachary and I have always been very close. Even too close — or so I sometimes worried, especially during the black year when Zachary was a moody, tyrannical, unappealing 3-year-old. But that phase passed, and I was left with a whimsical, cuddly dreamer whose company I relished.

In fact, shortly after Zachary was born, I realized that, through some mysterious alchemy, he had taken over my memories. Zelig-like, he appeared throughout my past. Though he wasn’t born until I was in my late 20s, I seemed to remember carrying him to the podium as I collected my high school diploma. I could almost remember holding him by one hand while holding a plastic cup of beer in the other at a college fraternity party. And wasn’t that Zachary in his stroller on the family vacation to a Florida alligator farm when I was 12? No doubt my memory confusion was due to the exhaustion of sudden single motherhood, but his ever presence in the movie of my life made its point obvious — I could not imagine myself before him or beyond him. Neither could I imagine, truly, how it might be possible for me to love another child as hopelessly and effortlessly. As desired as this second baby was, I felt a little sorry for her.

So Celeste was born, but only after a difficult seven-week preamble set into motion by premature labor. Though drugs and bed rest stopped the early labor, my instincts moved inexorably forward, and I could focus on nothing but the Force of Motherhood. I reminded myself of a friend’s pet rabbit, who inexplicably plucked out all of the fur on her chest one morning and then — surprise! — gave birth. Ten minutes before Celeste’s arrival, I looked up at the clock between pushes and realized that Zachary’s school was about to let out for the day. To everyone’s amazement, including my own, I barked at my husband to call his parents and the school, so that Zachary could be ushered in as soon as the baby was born. Gary hesitated, so I handed him the receiver. Not for a minute — not even on Pitocin — could I forget my sweet boy. Celeste was born at 3:27 p.m., school got out at 3:30 and Zachary walked into the room to meet his sister a few minutes later.

The transition into a fierce, uncontrollable, feral instinct to Protect The Infant crept noiselessly upon me over the first few days of Celeste’s life. Two days of wonderment and bliss gave way as a heat wave burned off my postnatal euphoria. My breasts grew hard as melons, and Zachary’s hovering over his focusless, moonfaced sister grew increasingly irritating and oppressive. Everything Zachary did infuriated me. To my horror, I realized that the “thing” I was protecting my newborn from was the huge, dirty, graceless creature my older child had become overnight. He receded in my heart, becoming a cypher for my older child instead of Zachary, my first baby, my little love, and he spun away from me like a figure waving just beyond my focus in the reflection of a mirror. Meanwhile, Celeste (beautiful, delicate, peaceful Celeste) took up more and more space in my psyche, noiselessly demanding to be reckoned with, inflating exponentially, like the balloon of Bart Simpson in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.

No one who has been through the experience can deny that the first weeks after childbirth are emotionally charged and hormonally merciless. Even as it was happening, as I gravitated helplessly toward my newborn and felt a gap widening between me and my eager, confused little boy, I knew we were part of an organic transformation not controllable by emotion or intellect. It was the will of the body — my body — that I focus my attention on the survival of my baby. And yet, sitting across the dinner table from my son, listening to his chatter while I nursed his infant sister, I often felt the urge to gather him up and beg, “Don’t go!” though I knew that I was the one who was going.

“I love you both equally” — the age-old answer sputtered by querulous, stammering parents to their querulous, suspicious children — is a myth we would like to believe. But it’s simply not possible to love any two humans equally — to do so would defy the nature of humanness in all its individuality. I wouldn’t even want to love my children equally if that meant without regard for their uniqueness, without discretion, a sort of blanket love policy that didn’t itemize their gifts and quirks and weak spots. And yet, until my second child was born, I would have been furious had anyone suggested that I might love my first child less.

As much as it saddens me, the truth is that my heart did not simply “expand” to accommodate my second child. Though I do, unequivocally, love both of my children deeply, it is also true that I have been more connected to my baby than to my son since the baby’s birth. The baby needs that connection, I tell myself; babies require the most passionate, most thorough love we are capable of. I also tell myself that, for eight years, I’ve been in the honeymoon phase — the baby phase — of my emotional relationship with my son. With Celeste’s birth, we entered the realistic phase.

Which isn’t to say that my love for my son is now finite. Like anything vital, it changes. And grows. And perhaps this change, which feels like such a loss, is also necessary and healthy. Perhaps we are now forging the relationship that will carry us, connected and yet separate, not just loving each other but with enough distance to like each other, into Zachary’s adulthood. That’s a comforting thought, but one with a cool breeze blowing through it, since the payoff seems so very far away.

On the final night of my week alone with Zachary last summer, the tattered shreds of cloud that had started to appear in the sky over the last couple of days finally bunched up, obscuring the stars in their flight. It was just as well: Zachary was so tired that I couldn’t rouse him from his nest of blankets on the couch, where he was “resting” until, as promised, I woke him for the midnight show overhead. But earlier that day, late in the hot, still afternoon, as the sun dropped below the tree line and cast us and the lake into shadow, in a quiet broken only by the occasional liquid trilling of a grosbeak, we caught a frog. Or rather, we found a tiny frog in the tall grasses at the water’s edge.

The length of my thumb and two shades of green, he had glimmering golden eyes and tiger striped legs. Sprinkled over his cool back were black speckles, as if someone had just ground pepper over him. For the longest time he patiently let us examine him, and we touched our fingertips to his creamy belly and watched him breathe. He was new, we decided, too young and confused to be afraid.

But finally he hopped away from our open hands and back to the edge of the lake, where he floated in a pool made by the matted grass. I know I will always remember that day — not just because, as Zachary whispered triumphantly, we finally captured a frog! or because the next day, back in the city, I went into labor seven weeks early. I’ll remember because I carry in my head a picture of Zachary, my firstborn, on his wet belly in the grass, his nose sprinkled with new freckles, his arms impossibly scrawny and pink with sunburn. For one last fleeting moment, he was my baby, my one and only. And then it was time to go.

Kate Moses is the author of "Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath" (St. Martin's.) She was the co-founder, with Camille Peri, of Salon's "Mothers Who Think" site, and she and Peri also co-edited the award-winning book "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenting." She lives in San Francisco. More Kate Moses.

Tuesday, Jun 17, 1997 9:01 AM UTC

Should teachers let students into their lives?

An inner-city teacher reflects on the murder of New York teacher Jonathan Levin.

By Anthony Cody

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jonathan levin a 31-year-old English teacher in one of New York’s
toughest public schools, has become the latest martyr to violence in our
society. His murder, for which two men — one a former student — have been
arrested, has provoked anguish on the part of his students and a search
for a rational explanation on the part of many others.

“The murder left some students and teachers wondering whether Levin had
been killed because of his own kindness,” reported the New York Times on June 11. “I don’t think teachers should do that no more,” 17-year-old Elena Avila was quoted. “I think it was wrong for Levin to be so trusting to kids, knowing the bad reputation of the school.”

Was Levin killed by his own kindness?

Some are pointing the finger of blame at the amount of violence depicted in the media, indirectly
indicting Levin’s father, the chairman and CEO of Time Warner, in his son’s
death.

Was Levin killed because of the glorification of violence by the media?

The reality is more complex than either of these explanations.

When a tragedy such as this one occurs, it is natural to ask if there was a way it could have been avoided. We tend to look at the immediate situation in which Levin found himself. Should Levin have refused to open his door to his former student? Should he have been less trusting? Should he have
stayed away from that neighborhood? Should he have just left those people
alone?

As a society, we tend to relieve Levin’s killers of responsibility, telling ourselves they must
have been pathological or unable to control themselves to commit such an act. I disagree; these were
people with wills of their own. They cannot be held blameless.

And not only are they guilty, we all are. I am
reminded of the recent statement of inner-city radio documentarian and high school student Lealan Jones, who was asked what kind of monsters (who were, in fact, children) could have dropped a young neighbor from a 14th story stairwell: “What type of monsters would put them in an environment like this? … Where the swings are not there, there’s not grass — just dirt patches.
In the homes, roaches run rampant, the stink of garbage in the air. What
type of monsters would put them in that environment? What type
of monsters can be created?”

And if we decide that Levin did not “belong” there, is there anyone who does
belong there? This line of thought leads us to a despairing attempt to escape from the reality of our cities and our schools. An escape was clearly available to Levin, but he ignored it, instead choosing the dangers, difficulties and rewards of
teaching.

Jonathan Levin has become etched into our consciousness because he cared
and acted when he was not obligated to do either. Because of his wealth and
family ties, Levin presumably could have achieved success in safety, far
from the mean streets of the Bronx.

While there is danger in our troubled times, there is also hope. And
teachers are on the front lines, coping with the first and trying to impart the
latter. We ask our students to excel, to meet high standards, while making
vague promises for their future. We hope that if they do work
hard, if they buy the dreams we are peddling, the pot of gold will be there
for them. But the gold never arrived for Levin’s killer, and even his
teachers’ bright vision for him could not illuminate a path to success.

Teachers can inspire, but only society can deliver the goods. Teachers can
build hope, but when that hope is not fulfilled, our good will alone is not
enough to protect us from the wrath of those rejected. We need more than a
responsible media. We need to create a reality that actively rewards the
hope teachers try so hard to inspire.

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Anthony Cody has taught junior high school science for 10 years at Bret Harte Junior High in Oakland, Calif. For the last two years he has been "on loan" to the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, developing a new middle school science curriculum. More Anthony Cody.

Monday, Jun 16, 1997 5:40 PM UTC

Why it's time for mothers who think

By Camille Peri

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Two months before her first child was born, Jane Smiley was suddenly struck by the seeming contradiction of teaching a course on Kafka and being pregnant. First, she wondered, would the baby somehow be marred for life by its in utero exposure to literature’s master of gloom? Second, would she be forced to repudiate great novels with grim parent-child relationships such as “Native Son” or “To the Lighthouse” for family romps like “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies”? But in giving birth to a child, Smiley found that she also gave birth to her subject, the interplay of love and power that was the seed of her novel “A Thousand Acres.” “Far from depriving me of thought, motherhood gave me new and startling things to think about and the motivation to do the hard work of thinking,” she wrote in her essay “Can Mothers Think?”

A look at the current media, however, would convince you that, like Pooh Bear, mothers are creatures of very little brains. The general press continues to separate child-rearing issues from Real News, treating the raising of the next generation primarily as a lifestyle issue. This reached new depths last month with People magazine’s ground-breaking report that Hollywood has discovered mothers can be sexy — that is, if they can manage to look like they never gave birth. Focusing on motherhood as a weight-loss issue, the article pointed out that for the new sex-symbol moms, “One of the true challenges of motherhood is the race back to prepregnancy shape.” No time bind here — with the help of at least one full-time nanny and a personal trainer, these women manage to fit the “role” of mothers into their “helter skelter lives,” neatly proving once and for all that mothers can have it all. (So what’s your problem?)

Almost as bad are some of the magazines and Web sites for parents. Big cultural issues, on those rare occasions when they are tackled, are fed to readers like strained peaches on a baby spoon. (Consider the article on racism that began, “Imagine for a moment that you live in a land where a number of the citizens have purple hair.”) More often, the reassuring tones of these publications barely mask an oddly desperate mission to wrestle child rearing into chirpy 12-step guides and 10-best lists, as if the complex range of dramas and emotions that really define motherhood were a wound best not probed too deeply. In the grand tradition of motherly self-sacrifice, Mom herself is allotted a tiny corner in these publications, where she is invited to indulge her free minutes in — what else? — tummy-flattening exercises.

Mothers Who Think offers a place for mothers to exercise their brains. We believe with Smiley that if mothers’ experiences are not widely expressed in our written culture, the culture at large suffers. During the last two decades, a number of women novelists have begun developing a maternal vision in literature, but Mothers Who Think will be the first Web site to explore the subject in its full gritty reality. It will also consider how motherhood reshapes our lives as women, challenging our sense of ourselves and our relationships with the world at large.

Mothers Who Think will look at the high and low aspects of mothering. Motherhood is the most essential relationship to the continuity of life, and the wiping of snotty noses. It possesses the tenderness of a Mary Cassatt painting one minute, the surreality of a Diane Arbus photo the next. Some mothers abandon their children, others cripple them by holding them too close; nearly all mothers discover an unnerving helplessness in the face of the passions that motherhood arouses. This department won’t provide a soft-focus celebration of motherhood but an exploration of it in all its dimensions. Through diverse perspectives, provocative interviews, online discussions of hot-button issues, select fiction and intensely personal stories, we will look at the myths and realities, serious and silly sides, thankless and supremely satisfying aspects of being a mother.

“I spend so much time at home with the kids that I really wasn’t sure I was capable of carrying on an intelligent conversation with anyone over 5,” said a ditsy movie mom played by Ellen Burstyn some years ago, describing her trepidation at being seated next to her husband’s boss at a dinner party. “It was going really well until I discovered that all the time we had been talking, I had been cutting up his meat for him.” Blurred boundaries characterize the lives of mothers. Forced underground for hours at a time, our intellectual life sprouts where and when it can, like fennel in sidewalk cracks. Sandboxes, zoo excursions and sidewalk stoops are the kind of places where mothers really talk about the world and our place in it. And in these unlikely settings, we have developed our own style of conversation, learning to string a few sentences over hours or even pick up a conversation days later.

The Mothers Who Think section of Table Talk provides the thrill of adult conversation any time, any place. (Imagine not having to miss a lively dinner party conversation to put the kids to bed!) We hope it will become a global mothers group, where we can talk across the gulf of national, racial and cultural differences about our shared and vastly different experiences of raising children in a complex and troubled world.

Women’s needs and interests do not end with motherhood, so neither does the scope of this department. Our articles and conversations will encompass issues that continue to consume us as women even as whole chunks of our life are vacuumed up in being parents. This department is meant to be manageably small, however. We aren’t inspired to provide endless recipes and resource lists that will end up making us all feel inadequate. Instead, every weekday we’ll bring you what we feel is worth taking time for — from insights into the most pressing news stories to help finding the cushiest pair of slippers. (Cookie recipes that substitute unsweetened applesauce for sugar will not be tolerated.)

One final word: Why mothers and not fathers or parents who think? Let’s be honest — the experience of motherhood still differs fundamentally from that of fatherhood. Though this department is dedicated to giving mothers a room of their own for intelligent discussion, we believe that many of the topics covered will be of universal interest, and we hope that fathers as well as mothers, nonparents as well as parents will lend their voices and vital insights to the mix. In the end, no one raises a child alone. Everyone who cares about children and the future is welcome to participate.

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Camille Peri is the editor of Mothers Who Think. More Camille Peri.

Tuesday, May 20, 1997 7:00 PM UTC

“Christ was quite anti-family”

An interview with Stephanie Coontz, author of "The Way We Never Were" and "The Way We Really Are".

By Lori Leibovich

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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.

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Lori Leibovich is a contributing editor at Salon and the former editor of the Life section. More Lori Leibovich.

Tuesday, May 20, 1997 7:00 PM UTC

A man's work is never done

An interview with Arlie Hochschild, author of The Time Bind.

By Kate Moses

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arlie Hochschild is a sociologist at the University of California’s Berkeley campus and the author of “The Time Bind.” Salon spoke with her recently.

The New York Times review of “The Time Bind” observed that your “calm, understanding tone” tended to disguise your book’s
alarming message. Were you alarmed by your findings about work and home?

Let me put it this way. I felt that there was something going on that
we haven’t clearly understood. I think the book itself is a story book.
There are a lot of different personal stories, and all of these are about
parents really trying to strike a balance. These are involved
parents. One single father described himself going to work and said it’s
just like a caffeine high, going from one meeting to the next until it got to be 5 o’clock, and finally he could sit down to his
real work. But it meant he couldn’t pick up his child until 6 or 6:30.
He said he felt like he wasn’t living his values. He moved me
tremendously; here was a good man and a good father, but he was caught in an imbalanced
life.

I guess I am a little bit worried, but not in the way the media has framed it. There was a horrible article on the cover of
U.S. News & World Report. That really threw
me back. I wrote a letter of protest to the editor. It introduced a very
accusatory tone. I felt it was a women-bashing tone.

Are you concerned that
your book is being interpreted as part of the backlash against feminism? Is there an implicit message that women should go home?

Am I concerned that it could be used that way? Yes. Is that what it
is? No, absolutely not. I see it as a call for an open, gentle, respectful, public conversation about what
steps we need to take to get a family-friendly workplace, more like they have in Sweden or
Norway — a 35-hour work week, work-sharing and so on. Motorola has done that in Arizona. In a way, this is crashingly
moderate. I am simply saying, look, knock two hours off on a Wednesday.
It would make it so much better for family life. That would be huge. Why not? Why can’t
we have that?

The “news” in “Time Bind,” as the New York Times put it, “is that growing numbers of
working women are leery of spending time at home.” Does this message, that more women are abandoning the home for work, let men off the hook?
Should we be more pointed in saying that men need to be more
responsible for the domestic maintenance of a family?

Yes, we do need to be more pointed about that. I think that is
exactly the direction that the conversation needs to take and actually
surveys show that children report that they want more time with their
fathers a lot more than they report that they want more time with their
mothers. Something like two-thirds
of kids say that they’d like more time with their fathers, and half of
them say they want more time with their mothers.
Let’s shape this article that way. Write about men. It really is true.

Do you think your book could have been more direct in pointing out men’s domestic responsibilities?

Yes, I think I could have.

Why didn’t you?

I wanted to end up with a non-gendered book. In a way this whole
family-friendly project is informally coded as a women’s project.
I wanted to de-gender it. Why I didn’t single out men is because I did
that in volume one of this study. “The Second Shift” is really all
pointed at men. Maybe I should have pointed at men twice, but in this
one … I could have probably made more of the men thing.

The time bind is in fact more a
man’s issue than a woman’s, because men have subtracted more time from
the home than women have but women are the ones who feel it.
They are expected to protect the home more. But all of us, men and women, have
to get ourselves out of what I call a “talk bind.” We can’t talk about
this without being guilt-tripped.

I think we really have to establish a safe, public place to
talk about this honestly. I would ask right-wing guilt-trippers to lay
off and detoxify this conversation, because it is an important one to
have in a safe, exploratory, non-guilt-trippy way. We are not alone in this.
It is a cultural issue.

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Saturday, May 3, 1997 7:00 PM UTC

Honey, I shrunk the family

Are men to blame for the disappearance of home life?

By Kate Moses

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“isn’t it odd,” sociologist Stephanie Coontz observes sarcastically in her new book, “The Way We Really Are,” “how quickly a discussion of working parents becomes an indictment of Mommy?” That indictment seemed apparent in U.S. News and World Report’s May 12 cover story, which blared, “Lies Parents Tell Themselves About Why They Work” accusingly from the newsstand. “When men (especially male politicians) talk about ‘working parents’ they really mean ‘working women,’” the newsweekly averred — and then proceeded to do exactly what it accused the politicians of doing.

Opening with a hapless 29-year-old professional woman’s feeble defense of why she left her 10-week-old baby in day care while she worked — “It’s not the amount of time I spend with my daughter, but the quality of time … Or maybe that’s just me rationalizing” — the article went on to enumerate five “lies” that parents tell themselves about why they’re working. Of these, the first and most important “lie” — “we both work because we need the money” — was clearly aimed at yuppie moms. Pointing out that wealthier families are as likely to have both parents working as poorer ones, the article argued that such families don’t really need the money. The real villain of the piece, lurking backstage, was the upper-middle-class mother who dumps her young kids in child care so she can buy a swimming pool.

Both the U.S. News article and Newsweek’s simultaneous cover story, “The Myth of Quality Time,” drew heavily on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s much-talked-about new book, “The Time Bind.” Hochschild’s book presents a simple, startling thesis: For many Americans, including women, home is becoming work, a place to escape from, and work is becoming home, a seductive and stimulating environment. At the pseudonymous “Amerco,” a Midwestern Fortune-500 company profiled by Hochschild, an entire program of “family-friendly” policies had been instituted to encourage their employees to carve out more family time, and yet the program attracted shockingly few takers. Only 53 of 21,070 employees opted for part-time work; a total of two men took paternity leave. Even the most popular program, flextime, attracted only a third of working parents.

The reasons why were various and mostly predictable: peer pressure, bottlenecking supervisors, financial need, fear of being labeled “uncommitted to the company.” The surprise, though, was that women were just as likely as men to pass up “family-friendly” policies in order to keep working Amerco’s long (an average of 47 hours per week) hours.

Stephanie Coontz doesn’t see anything wrong with this. In “The Way We Really Are,” a statistics-drenched analysis that defends American families against the doomsaying of “family values” propagandists, she argues that women who work do better than those who don’t — and that their children, by and large, don’t suffer, either. She cites studies showing that women who work are “consistently healthier, less depressed, and less frustrated than women who do not,” and says that a woman’s satisfaction with her role, whether as worker, homemaker or spouse, “is one of the best predictors both of a good relationship with her child and of the child’s own well-being.”

Not surprisingly, Coontz takes exception to the way the media is spinning the time-crunch issue. “These cover stories, particularly the U.S. News & World Report one,” she says, “are aimed right at the hearts of working women and implicitly endorse a stop-gap, 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.” Although sales of her book are undoubtedly profiting by the hoopla, Hochschild also decries the newsweeklies’ alarmist tone: “I guess I am a little bit worried … That (article) really threw me back. I wrote a letter of protest to the editor. It introduced a very accusatory tone. I felt it was a woman-bashing tone.”

In separate interviews, both Hochschild and Coontz point the finger of blame not at mommies, but at daddies. They argue that American men have made a career out of escaping from home for decades, and nobody has raised an eyebrow. Male flight not only allows men to indulge their morbid fear of housework, it places them in an environment where they are paid for their time, respected and recognized. Child-rearing and housework, on the other hand, are supposed to be their own rewards. For many women they are, but it shouldn’t be surprising that women find the workplace as attractive as men do — particularly when men aren’t carrying their weight at home. In Hochschild’s earlier book, “The Second Shift,” which studied two-job families, she found that regardless of how many hours they work outside the home, women are forced to do most of the housework and child rearing; men simply don’t do their share. According to a new book, “Time for Life,” cited by Newsweek, men spend only 17.4 hours per week on housework, while women spend 35.1. (And men only put in seven more hours per week on the job — no help, there, guys.) Granted, many men are far more involved in their children’s lives than were, for example, their own fathers, but that doesn’t excuse them from doing the laundry every other week.

Neither does touting “family-friendly” policies excuse employers from implementing them in a practical way. Amerco was ultimately unsuccessful in attaining more flexibility for its workers because it failed to clear the roadblocks — uncooperative middle managers, corporate “evil eyes,” sexist “mommy track” assumptions — that prevented employees at every level from utilizing the programs the company had gone to great expense to develop. Both Coontz and Hochschild point out that women have entered a work culture that was created by men without regard to family needs. “Family-friendly benefits like flextime are mostly cosmetic,” Coontz says, “and most workers know they are.”

Both Hochschild and Coontz have concrete suggestions to improve the lot of working families. These include creating alternative work and school schedules, giving tax incentives for businesses and implementing federally regulated and mandated family benefits, the most important of which is high quality, affordable child care. Hochschild calls for a national dialogue about work and family, but clearly what she is really asking for is that men acknowledge their unequal share of power and relinquish it — something less likely to happen in an overt way.

In analyzing who’s to blame for the time-crunch predicament, no doubt Coontz and Hochschild are right to shift the emphasis from the evil yuppie mom — that venerable figure of cultural abuse — to the housework-avoiding dad. But in the end, the blame may rest less with either dads or moms than with the inexorable, seductive logic of America’s late-capitalist commodity culture, which is increasingly making family life into an image of itself: high-speed, compartmentalized and rational. And the real issue is how this squeezed family life (Hochschild calls kids “time squatters”) is going to affect children in the future. Despite the studies that Coontz cites in her book, which show that the children of mothers who work outside the home and the children of mothers who don’t fare pretty much the same, it’s hard not to believe that a childhood’s worth of nine-hour days at preschool, or having an hour or two of earnestly believed-in “quality time” with one’s parents before everyone collapses into bed, or shuttling between four different baby-sitters while the parents work back-to-back shifts, or coming home to the glow of TV and an eerily shadowed house every day after junior high, is going to affect a child’s life. As comforting as it is to know that your kid isn’t going to be any worse off than the kid of the housewife down the street, is that really all our children should be permitted to expect?

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