via lomokev @ flickr
I possess a certain masochism, so when I spied a copy of the upcoming book by radio host and noted homophobe Laura Schlessinger (a.k.a. Dr. Laura), I felt compelled to give it a closer look. The title kind of says it all: In Praise of Stay-at-Home Moms. The blurb on the publisher’s website digs a little deeper.
These are women who know in their hearts that staying home to raise their children is the right choice for the whole family. Some do it from the outset of their marriages, while others make the difficult transition from career-driven women to homemakers. Either way, it is a choice that is incredibly rich and rewarding, not to mention challenging.
Let me make myself clear when I say that this post is not an attack on stay-at-home moms (SAHMs). Really, that would be petty and pointless. I’d rather take people like Dr. Laura to task for reenforcing the “traditional” dictate that being a SAHM is “the right choice for the whole family.” It’s not circular logic to say that her statement inevitably decrees that being a working mother must be the wrong choice for the family. As the daughter of a working mother and a working stepmother, that really drives me insane. Do we really need to up this game of What Kind of Mommy Is Best?
It’ll be interesting to see what, if any, impact this book will have given the fact that America’s economy is not exactly what you would call “robust” at the moment. The argument that the best situation for a family is to have the mother at home is predicated on the assumption that Daddy has a job. But with layoffs affecting almost every sector of the workforce, it would seem logical to conclude that there will be some SAHMs whose family finances are affected drastically by the recession and may find themselves stepping into (or stepping back into) the professional sphere. That was certainly the experience of both my grandmothers — women who wanted to stay at home but could not because their husbands were unable to hold down a job. On the flip side, mothers who have worked for years are now finding themselves unemployed and are now inadvertent SAHMs.
And, oh yeah, there are those things called stay-at-home dads. But it’s no fun to talk about them! When men go out the door every day with their briefcase, they clearly have the Best Interest of the Children (TM) at heart, as they work hard for a paycheck that keeps the family afloat. When women do the same, they are neglecting their poor children who need Mommy’s apron strings to cling to. Daddy’s apron strings just won’t cut it! Schlessinger’s book is further described as “a profound and unique understanding of how important it is for mothers to raise their own children.” I’m not quite sure what that statement even means. Having taught daycare for over a year, every child I worked with came from a family with two working parents. Not once did I ever think that the mothers weren’t “raising their own children.”
Schlessinger’s brand of mommy-shaming is not at all new. And it’s still all-too-common. A recent poll shows that two in five men believe it’s better for the family “if the man earns the money and the woman takes care of the home and children.” And two in five women believe the same thing. In slightly more encouraging news, 80% of the women respondents say that working mothers can have relationships with their children that are every bit as meaningful and present as the relationships between SAHMs and their children. (67% of men agree with that assessment.)
So while Schlessinger is not presenting any fresh ideas with her book, it’s clear that this is a discussion that still needs to be had if we want to change the antipathy towards working mothers. Even in this day and age, when such women are far from an anomaly (70% of mothers work outside the home) and are often necessary for a family’s economic welfare, mothers who making the exact same choice to work that fathers do are still under attack for being selfish, neglectful, and destructive to their families. $20 to the first Harpy reader* who calls into Schlessinger’s show and asks her point-blank why she didn’t title her book In Praise of Stay-at-Home Parents and take the gender issue out of it. The mommy-shaming has to stop.
*Seriously.
Remind me: did Schlessinger stay at home when her son was small? Or is this just a “do as I say, not as I do” kinda thing? No, wait, I’ll guess.
Even if your husband has a job, having one income in this day and age is very difficult. A co-worker has triplets and because one of them is autistic his wife made the decision to stay home. He makes a very comfortable living and they are STRUGGLING.
Obviously, Dr. Laura missed the Great Internet Mommywar of 2005. Does she even know what she’s playing at? There will be BLOOD!
Some do it from the outset of their marriages
because nothing breeds isolation and resentment like being cooped up in a house without anyone else around all day. I can’t for the life of me imagine how awful it would be to be home, no school, no work, no volunteering, for the foreseeable future. How cripplingly lonely that must be.
@bluebears: There’s a lot of classism in this whole thing. Who cares if you’re struggling financially? Stay home, woman! That’s what good mothers do! You just should have married a richer man.
A recent poll shows that two in five men believe it’s better for the family “if the man earns the money and the woman takes care of the home and children.” And two in five women believe the same thing.
I don’t know if this means it’s “all too common,” honestly, because it means that 3/5 believe it’s better if both earn or better if the women earn, right? I wouldn’t mind Dr. Laura’s quote if it say “better choice for THEIR family” instead of “the” family.
Maybe those 2/5ths are rigid, gender-role-enforcing regressive thinkers…but if there’s a matching 2/5 population for them to marry… Seems like the math works out.
This is all due to the patriarchy’s relentless fetishization of children. And the reason families with three kids struggle, it seems to me, is because it is now de rigeur to give that kid a cellphone from age eight. Quelle horreur.
@mkp: This goes back to the issue of gender. If Dr. Laura said it would be better for the family if one parent stayed at home, then fine. I don’t agree but it wouldn’t piss me off. But framing it to be the mother who is ideal for this is what bothers me. And yes, I do think 40% of respondents thinking it’s better for women to stay home is too much. The last time the poll was conducted in 1977, the figures were 60% who thought women are better at home than at work, so there has been a drop. Still, why is one gender better at home than another? Nobody ever, EVER asks if fathers “should” stay home.
@Sarah… I absolutely agree with that part of it. There’s a lot of hero worship of that mother/child bond and while I think it’s more than appropriate to appreciate whichever parent stays home, to have this reverence for the mothers is misplaced.
@Pilgrim: Not necessarily. My mother would have had to work even if she didn’t want to because my father left. (Note that these studies never take into account that some women are the only possible breadwinner in their family.) And it was a struggle to save despite the fact that she did not indulge in any luxury items when my sister and I were very young. She was too busy paying off law school loans and doctor bills.
I should have clarified: it’s not necessarily that families struggle because they over-indulge their children with needless commodities.
@PS: my mom worked since I was 9 months old, and she probably would have made the decision to work regardless, but my parents certainly felt they needed two incomes back in the 80s-90s. Believe me, we lived comfortable but not lavishly. Kids are really expensive little buggers.
Can we also get some clarity on what “know in their hearts” means?
Is that the same thing as “believe”? Because I don’t think, “These women believe they’re making the right choice” has quite the same surety to it.
@braak – Oh, God told them. Dr. Laura forgot to spell that out.
I “believe” that “know in their hearts” would be opposed to “know in their brains” braak.
I agree with both sarah.of. and PS on the kids being expensive thing. I think a. the total lack of social safety net in the us makes medical bills, saving for retirement/sudden doom, paying for occasional or full time child care makes raising kids here genuinely expensive but b. parents are expected to spend BOTH more time AND more money on children than they ever have before.
@braak: They know it in their hearts because they’ve been told for years that good mommies make their kids the absolute ground zero center of the universe.
oh and also college. COLLEGE. fuck. i mean i know you can make your kid take out loans but a lot of parents feel the need/desire to save for that shit.
Since I was laid off in March I’ve been ineptly filling part of the role of stay-at-home uncle and I have to say, I’m pretty offended when Dr. Laura tries to get people to think that my affection and attention aren’t as valuable merely because I’m not a woman. For all the money they cost, kids are pretty easy (unless of course I’m doing it wrong) and all they care about is that someone is there to kiss there boo-boos and be ridden around on like a horse.
@Mkp: So, is this some kind of secret religious shibboleth, or something? That, like, the people that really love God will recognize “know in their hearts” as “divine inspiration”?
@JD: This raises all kinds of interesting epistemological questions. Like, what happens if they get a heart transplant? Would they forget all the things their hearts knew? Would they fall in love with David Duchovny, somehow? Also, what does it mean to have a heart attack? Is that like an existential crisis, except about things that you know in your heart instead?
@jd: I mean right, the co-worker I was talking about pays like 1200 bucks a month for health care for his family. Plus most of the autism expenses are out of pocket because bluecross isn’t required to cover it.
Also I am not sure if patriarchy fetishizes children per se — patriarchy was alive and well when the concept of “children” was very different than the one we have now. Instead I think patriarchy fetishizes fertility, or rather the control of fertility by anyone other than the one doing the childbearing.
Maybe that’s the same thing/what you meant though.
You know, this makes me glad that my friends are who my friends are. In my daily existence, I don’t have to deal with craptastic people like this. Heck, I’ve had 2 friends offer to marry me and be the stay-at-home dad. (I think they liked the second part of it more than the first, me-related part of it, but whatever.) I used to babysit for a family where the dad stayed at home with the three boys because the mom had more earning potential. A completely rational decision not based on gender expectations: fabulous.
And, no, she didn’t stay home with her son. She had him in 1985 and was on the radio in the 1980s, when she received her “big break”. Thanks, wikipedia.
Yeah, JD, I’ve been mulling over lately talking about the high rates of college tuition in this country being a huge driver of the overspending problem… but it’s not really appropriate for this blog.
And yes, I think what I meant was a little less narrow than what it sounded like, because SOALG, I don’t exactly disagree with you. I just think we all spend way more money on everything than we did when I was a kid. I never had clothes that were not Kmart/Zellers (hi Canadians!) in origin/price range until I was probably 16 or 17. And then, I was forced to pay for them myself. My parents are mondo cheap, and I’m sort of glad, because they have made me afraid of debt.
JD, to be clear, I don’t think the patriarchy’s fetishization of children is necessary to its existence, but I do think it is the modern form of the “woman’s place is in the home” nonsense. When that argument began to lose cultural currency, the patriarchy got sneaky and tried to maintain that it was All About the Children (TM), when in fact it was All About Making Women Feel Guilty For Wanting Anything Other Than Motherhood.
braak you are kidding but i think these are live questions — is inspiration different than instinct? is instinct different than “how i was socialized?” is there a kind of knowing that is more true, reliable, or of a higher order than others? it reminds me of kennedy’s reasoning in gonzales v. carhart, the decision limiting late term abortion (forgive me if i’m butchering the actual holding of the case), when he spoke about the grief some women experience after abortion, the love and fulfillment some women experience upon motherhood, but never the terror of some pregnancies, the relief of some abortions, or the spectrum of tedium to homicidal feelings of parenting. or oh yeah, life of the mother.
um, doesn’t everyone fall in love with david duchovny? i’m pretty sure that one is rooted in neither the brain nor the heart.
bb, as someone who used to do therapy with 2- and 3-year-olds with autism, it’s AMAZING how it’s a full-time job just to get your kid to interventions. I mean, families were in our program for 14 hours a week, typically got at least 3 hours/week of speech therapy, then also OT and whatever special developmental preschool program the school district provided… seriously, it easily added up to 30-40 hours a week of just getting the kids to where they needed to go to get help. Astounding.
@Pilgrim Soul: Yeah, it depends on the parents. My stepsister is awesome at resisting the materialistic crap that is constantly thrown at her as the key to her child’s happiness. Because, y’know, a 21-month-old really cares about how much his favorite blanket costs.
@Ryan: Yeah, this goes back to SarahMC’s post about dads who “babysit”. http://www.harpyness.com/2009/03/06/pet-peeve-dads-who-babysit-their-kids/ Men are expected to be slightly aloof and not actual caregivers. That’s a woman’s job!
yeah i get you ps. i’m also relentlessly frugal/believe wealth is bad for people, democracy and human flourishing so i’m definitely of the thrift shop and hand me down school of parenting. except i’m not a parent.
wouldn’t it just solve the WHOLE SAHM MESS if people just said “stay at home parent” and meant it? wouldn’t it?
@JD, no, because then we would spend out days fobbing off accusations that we were “devaluing motherhood.”
this is why so many feminists are bitter alcoholics.
sometimes i think equality is all wicked simple really and the emperor has no clothes. then i actually try to get some legislation passed or change cultural norms and want to choke myself to death on dr. laura books.
@JD: Stop that equality shit right now! Stop it! You’ll scare the children!
THE CHILDREN. You know how much they hate stay at home fathers and day care! Always complaining about it! All those life long psychological scars! Oh wait.
I’M ONLY A MAN-HATING FEMINIST BECAUSE MY MOTHER WORKED! IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW! I AM SCARRED FOR LIFE!
so what’s dr. laura’s excuse?
Certinaly there is a problem of classism here. Some couples can not afford to have one parent stay at home. Single parents certianly don’t have a chioce at all. For some couples the woman makes more money than the man, so it just makes sense for her to be a working mom and him to be a SAHD; yet she will still be told she isn’t making good choices for her kids and he will be told he is “lazy”. Not to mention that the moms stay at home and dads go to work meme gets really messed up for homosexual couples.
But income isn’t the only factor in deciding weather to be a working mother or a SAHM. Personally, I agree with kithkin. If I were a SAHM, I would feel cooped up and become really unhappy. And I don’t know about you, but I’d take a happy working mom over a depressed SAHM. (No I’m not saying SAHMs are unhappy, I’m just saying that *I* make a better working mom than a stay at home mom, and I shouldn’t be judged as a terrible mom or making bad decisions because of it.)
Is Dr. Laura an MD, or does she have like, a bullshit Ph.D from someplace like Regent or Liberty?
I mean, I plan to be a SAHM some day and I still want to punch her in the face.
“The right choice for the whole family” phrase really does me in, as she manages to imply that all other options are clearly wrong. Not to mention the sweeping assumption that must underlie this statement – that all women are better at raising kids than any man. I love that she also manages to ignore completely the financial implications re:that the woman might be the better breadwinner. ‘Cos no one worries about money these days, right?!
@Ryan: nice, a guy who gets why this is insulting to men as well as women!
I think everyone should do what best for them and their families, but the current trend of ‘high-maintenance mothering’ really does no one any favors.
If you want to read a scathing rebuttal to Dr. Laura, go look up Linda Hirshman’s article in the American Prospect (it came out a few years ago), in which she takes on “opting-out” and choice feminism. It’s highly entertaining. She expanded on it in a book, but you can get the gist of it from the article.
My parents gave me a Dr. Laura book for my 16th birthday. I think it was the one about “10 stupid things women do to mess up their lives” or some such nonsense. (Obviously, I never read it.) Dad listened to her radio show every day (along with Limbaugh, obviously).
You can’t see me, but right now I’m patting myself on the back for making it out of that house with a modicum of sanity and open-mindedness. It’s a freakin’ miracle, I tell you.
@Cat: She also says it’s better for the marriage. Presumably because it will leave your husband secure in the knowledge that his wife has his dinner ready and doesn’t want to outpace him in the professional sphere. Or some such nonsense.
Of course it’s “better” for the marriage! Making women totally financially dependent on their men is one of the best ways to guarantee than they will stay married, no matter what!
By “marriage” she means the husband. It’s better for the husband. And like PhD points out, it will make the marriage last longer due to the woman’s lack of options.
@annimal “everyone should do what’s best for them and their families.”
Exactly. Problem is people like Dr. Laura don’t realize that people are different and what works for one person won’t work for another.
@soalg: Ah yes, the old men-are-so-weak-and-need-their-egos-babied-by-us-women argument. And obvs no man actually goes into a marriage looking for a true partnership…
@PhDork: They do seem to treat “marriage” as if it is its own entity. The end goal is a long marriage, even if you are both miserable! Because you didn’t get married to make each other happy, just to create this strange 3rd party with a life of its own and the ability to tell you what to do.
There are many things I hated about pregnancy. There were, of course, the physical bits that were dreadful, but outside of the throwing up five times a day for five months, my two least favorite things were the coworkers who forgot my name and referred to me as “Mommy,” and the coworkers who fell all over themselves to tell me how wonderful it was that I was staying home, and how much better off my son would be, and how proud I should be that I was doing the right thing.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I absolutely believe that my staying home is the best thing for my family. I wouldn’t be doing it otherwise. But don’t really think it makes much of a difference for my son. I mean, sure he got to nurse a lot longer, but other than that, I don’t think I give him much that an early-education trained childcare provider could during the day. It’s best for my family economically (my husband makes a lot more money than I did). It’s good for me because I hated my job. It’s good for my husband because when he gets home I’ve done enough housework that he can ignore the house and pay attention to the kid without guilt. But the people who fell all over themselves to tell me what a great sacrifice I was making for my son always made me want to throw things.
It didn’t help that there was another pregnant coworker who was going back to work. Was she supposed to feel like a failure?
Avogadro, you are awesome.
Wait, I know! Since when my son has a bad night, I also don’t sleep, the crankiness I expose him to when he’s already teething or feverish or just tired is super character building! That must be why staying at home is better.
Thanks, Pilgrim Soul. I think you’re awesome-er.
Av0gadro, thank you so much for your perspective. Seriously. When I was pregnant, I was asked all the time if I was going to stay home, and the answer was a big, fat no. Not because I didn’t want to (I kind of think that I eventually would have tried to take a year or two off to be with him, but that’s speculation) but because I was going to be flying solo with very minimal savings that would have quickly been exhausted anyway. The whole thing is moot now, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that shit like this from Dr. Laura actually gives SAHMs a bad name, as if they don’t have any ambitions and dreams of their own and exist solely to serve their family. The truth is never that simple, nor is it that simple for working moms.
Yeah, soalg, I think a lot of the conversation about motherhood acts like motherhood exists in a vacuum, and moms are making their decisions for just one or two reasons, when in reality there are a million factors to think about in all of the big decisions.
I will say that another aspect of the whole SAHM conversation that I find classist is the assumption that SAHMs are giving up their careers to stay home. I didn’t have a career. I had a job. People who have careers are lucky. People who have jobs would usually give them up in a heartbeat given the opportunity.