The modern world has screwed mothers. On the one hand, they are raising children and caring for the home same as they have been doing for generations. But the demands of parenting today’s children are far greater than they ever have been in human history. Additionally, women today are expected to take advantage of the great opportunities our post-feminist society has bequeathed them. Squeezed from all sides, its no wonder that women’s issues are on the forefront of discussions in and out of the church.
The Liability of Privileged Children
Today’s children are extraordinarily privileged. Like the children of kings and dukes of the past, children today, both rich and poor, are taught to read, write, pursue elite accomplishments like the violin, participate in organized athletics, and highly competitive academics. They are showered with enormous individual attention, praise, and high expectations. Above all, they require an exorbitant investment of time and money from mom and dad.
Consider how unbalanced our modern situation is compared with former times. In the past, 99% of people were relatively poor, and children were financial assets that could quickly be put to work on the family farm or business. Childcare was not unduly arduous for mom, as she didn’t have many outside expectations for her children. The bounds of existence were extremely narrow. Children were simply underfoot, free range, as she worked, and as they learned to work along side of her. And for the wealthy 1%, children were no burden either. Their parents easily paid for governesses, music tutors, boarding school, etc. leaving mom and dad ample time to pursue their own accomplishments and aspirations.
However, children today add no financial value to their families. They are a total liability, with their value being only metaphysical. Most of the parents of these elite children are middle class or poor, without the means to raise them according to their oversize expectations. It’s not uncommon for today’s middle class parents break the bank trying to get their kids into private schools, or make other enormous sacrifices so that their children can get ahead of all the other over-scheduled children in the neighborhood.
Separating Work from Home
The modern world dealt yet another blow to the family by separating work from the home. Today, the home is relegated to a distant suburb, while parents work in an office or factory far away. In the past, work and home were much more closely related, with mom adding financial value to the domicile by sewing goods for the market, milking the cow, churning the butter, with the children close by. Today’s middle class SAHM does many of the same kind of things as yesterday’s mom, adding financial value to her home by cooking, cleaning, shopping, saving, etc. just as poor mothers have always done, but she has the disadvantage of also having to be a governess to her elite, privileged children, being soccer mom, piano mom, driving them through an endless daily maze of schools, lessons, sports, and church activities. Even without doing any work outside the home, SAHM works harder than mom has ever worked.
Post-Feminist Guilt
And if that wasn’t bad enough, overworked SAHM now has to carry the burden of the unrealized expectations that the post-feminist world has bequeathed her. Before she became a SAHM, she was raised like any other privileged child: told she could be anything she wanted, accomplish anything a man could accomplish. She was educated, trained, and spent years developing her unique talents. She learned languages, went to university, served a mission, worked in offices.
But when the children came, and she felt she must give her children all exorbitant privileges the modern world offers, just as she had been (but even more!). Anything less would brand her a selfish, neglectful mother. Thus she becomes governess to her little elites, as well as cook, butler, house manager to her tiny, underfunded estate. These are all noble occupations, but they represent just a narrowest slice of all the options that once dazzled her eyes.
Solutions?
Does it help that the church says “Celebrate motherhood, speak of nurturing”? Yes, I think it could be a balm for overworked SAHMs, those who have already sacrificed their own professional fulfillment. But the root problem has still not been addressed. These mothers are nurturing daughters, not to become mothers, but to become women who can accomplish anything! Then these daughters sacrifice all and become mothers and teach their daughters the same thing, and the cycle continues, as the guilt rages on all sides.
The real problem is not that today’s women no longer want to be mothers, or that they are being selfish. The real problem is the peculiar dynamics of the modern world: over-privileged children, and the separation of work and home. A possible solution could be: lighten up on expectations for children, and bring childcare into work, or work into the home. These are political and social changes. In some European countries, many offices have a built in daycare, and the government mandates extremely generous maternity leave (up to 4 years) and even up to a year of paternity leave. These sorts of policies are the result of recognizing that while children might be a short-term liability for the family, they are a long term asset for the country.
Questions?
- Are there other solutions to the working mother crisis?
- Do you agree that mothers face greater challenges than ever before?
- How can women balance the intense expectations of both family and career?
- What is the church doing that is helping or hindering?
Wheat & Tares 
I question whether Moms today face greater challengers than before. Anecdotally speaking my Great Grandma, it’s believed, killed herself in 1934, the challenges of life on a farm in the depression, having two adult kids die before her, a husband die while arguing politics before, no real social security and so having to live off of her remaining kids just proved too much for her. Think about Charlie Chaplin’s mother, same basic situation, raising two boys in Victorian England was too much for her and she had breakdown and correct me if I am wrong but she never killed herself but she never recovered.
The hardest part of working full-time with a first grader was living with mormon mommy guilt, all the voices inside my head (from the Teachings of the Living Prophets Manual) saying I was choosing the lesser part and ruining my kid. I was a great mom, and I was surrounded by other faithful, amazing, christian, working moms raising amazing kids in Virginia. I may have had less discretionary time . . . but I was able to prioritize the most important things. The source of my dissatisfaction was not my inability to complete the tasks successfully, it was the rhetoric poured down my throat telling me I was wrong for doing so. That and Sunday being church day means we never had a day of rest. Saturday home maint work. Sunday church work (bishopric, presidency member). Rest of the week work.
Ideal world: paid maternity leave and 30-35 hour full time work weeks. (Mostly second wave) Feminists don’t want paid maternity leave – they want paid parental leave, so they work to get it both ways. Meanwhile traditionalists fight any family friendly work policies in hopes of keeping those ladies home with their kids, that and it would hurt shareholders’ bottom lines, I’m sure. Sure would invest in our society though. Being the only developed nation without mandated maternity leave is embarrassing and we should be ashamed.
Nate, I think you are missing an important point – Heavenly Father doesn’t send all of our daughters on a path of motherhood. Sometimes He sends them a path of single-hood or infertility, and if we don’t prepare our daughters for whatever Heavenly Father has in store for them to become . . . what may happen is what happened to me, a girl who wanted to be barefoot and pregnant, with 10+ kids, whose only ambition was to be a mother in Zion, and the only education I cared about getting was an Office Systems Mgt degree, cuz the only purpose of a girl earning an education was to use as a back up.
I was entirely unprepared for the path God had in store for me. And it sucked.
Instead of pushing motherhood as the way to be a Woman of God, can we say, “Daughter, the most important thing is for you to be a Woman of God. He gave you many talents and skills and wants you to use those to build the Kingdom of God. You might be using those in motherhood. But you might not get that path. But the most important thing is to be a woman of Character. Your character determines your worth. Not your role.”
I’d love to be able to celebrate all the Women of God in our mormon lives that aren’t mothers. But we don’t do that, we just call them “mothers” and celebrate them for something they aren’t, which is pretty demoralizing. It is possible to celebrate all contributions without minimizing what is seen as “the only one”.
If I never see that “Motherhood/Nurturing” Meme again, I’d be happy.
I am so so so fortunate that my husband never saw caring for children as my job alone, but as something we both did, as close to 50/50 as possible. I am realizing more and more how unusual that was for our era (baby boomers) – and how unusual it remains. I thought that it was because he is in academia and therefore has a more flexible schedule. Those 9-5 guys obviously couldn’t do it (I thought). But I certainly didn’t and don’t see many other academic dads as dedicated to child care as my husband. We came up with incredibly convoluted scheduling solutions sometimes, but they worked. Not always easy to be two-career with 5 kids, but definitely worth it.
He’s the same way when we have the grandkids over.
Just a reminder to myself to thank him on Fathers Day.
It seemed pretty obvious to me as a teenager that there was a horrible double standard in telling young men that their career ambitions meant they were selfless while the same feelings meant the girls were selfish. Likewise, it’s a double standard when we tell men that they are selfish if they want to stay home, yet women who do so are selfless. How about we get past this nonsense and let couples make decisions that work for them collectively and individually.
Overscheduling of children is a completely modern phenomenon that women have created because they are so underutilized. They need to compete, to achieve, to use their minds, and if they have no productive means outside the home to do so, they will use their god-given talents to bake better pies, have cleaner houses, and have more accomplished children than others. But that takes a toll on women psychologically as they fall prey to perfectionism which leads to depression. It also takes a toll on family members to have one person in the family living vicariously through others. How about we all pursue our dreams, whatever they may be? Let’s quit limiting people with narrow gender roles that don’t fit 45% of us.
Totally agree with Kristine A – shorter houred work weeks – 30 to 35 would be ideal. More family friendly policies. Even having daycares in the work place would help save time in commuting to daycares, etc, and with breast feeding mothers.
In the church, girls are taught that motherhood is the single most important thing they will do, and it is the most important way they will influence the future. I see this point, but I do not think it’s the only way, or most important necessarily. People can ‘pay it forward’, effecting an important influence on future generations many different ways, parenthood being one of them.
Most of us want our kids to ‘have it all’, but I also think a lot of SAHMs are living through their children – using their competitive and achieving drives through their children because they have nowhere else to go with it.
Whether or not it’s harder than before, I’m not sure. It’s different. The challenges are different. What I do think is different than before is the guilt – there’s a lot of guilt in motherhood these days….
Wizzbang, I’m thinking of that Dorthea Lang photograph, and you’ve got a good point. Life in general is much easier for everyone in the modern era, so that must be taken into account. Probably most poor moms of centuries past would gladly trade places with a harried suburban mom. My post is simply an observation about how modern society has given women the short end of the stick, while at the same time raising everyone’s standard of living.
Kristine A, your comment made me think of my nephew’s ordination to the aaronic priesthood, and was impressed with just how much attention, expectation, love, and praise was showered upon him, and I saw him soaking in the importance of such a rite of passage, the promise it held for him as a successful leader in the church, as a future father, provider, etc. Then I noticed his younger sister, much more needy, much more insecure, and realized she will never have such an experience in church herself. Her example is not her father, and his successful job, his leadership positions in church, but her mother, who renounced all to raise 6 children. It will be no suprise if my niece doesn’t aggressively persue the development of her talents and potential, and if my nephew does.
CRW, excellent point. You’ve mentioned something else the modern world has bequethed us, which is that fathers now are expected to share at least some of the parenting duties. I should have mentioned this as one of my solutions. Like KT suggests, which is better? Man works 40h, Wife works 0h for a family total of 40h? Or, Man works 30h, wife works 30h for a total 60h. In the second case, the family has 20h extra paid time, and they can use that money to pay for extra childcare for times that mom or dad is not available for the kids. It’s good to get the kids away from the parents once in awhile in my opinion.
Hawkgrrrl, that’s a good point. It becomes an vicious cycle: unfulfilled mothers live through their children, so children become over-scheduled. This then feeds back to extra stresses upon the unfulfilled mothers, leaving them with even less time to potentially be able to find their own fulfillment. The more unfulfilled the mother becomes, the more pressure the child faces, and so on and so forth.
One solution is to not surrender your kids to the demands of the modern world, I suppose. I had a number of thoughts about all of these things as I’ve been reading the post and comments. The first was that my wife and I haven’t really surrendered our lives to our kids as so many modern parents have done. We have provided them with some opportunities to be involved in sports, music, and theatre, but if they haven’t been wildly enthusiastic about those things, we haven’t tried to manufacture enthusiasm on their behalf. We have one son who began to love the piano and got quite good at it. A couple of other kids are journeyman string players at best. Two daughters seem serious about vocals, one about dance, but we haven’t busted our budget with lessons and private dance teams and traveling sports and so on. Not only have we not had the money, we’re not willing to make the time. The kids weren’t clamoring for it, and while I have no doubt that they would have gone along with it had we pushed them, there was no reason for us to push them.
They seem to be pretty well-adjusted people now, all five, ranging in age from 23 to 13. Well, the 13-year-old is a 13-year-old girl. But I have high hopes for her. 🙂
At one low point in my career, I was laid off, started my own business, had no income, and we almost went broke. My wife had been homeschooling the kids. We were forced to put the little boogers back into the public schools and she went back to work as a teacher (and earned a master’s degree), which she had done when we were first married. I felt more guilty about that than she did, and I’m getting over it. The kids haven’t suffered much for it, I don’t think, except in educational quality – and they still get quite a bit of that at home, just not formally. Now I’ve been back to work for a number of years, and my wife still out-earns me and probably always will. No big deal. We both parent our kids, and they seem to deal with it.
Even though Sister Iconoclast’s goal was always to be a mom and homemaker, she also got a degree in education, taught while I was finishing school, and while we were building our family, she ran a daycare while starting the homeschool process with our kids. Being useful in many ways has always been second nature to her. Although we prioritized having her home with the kids, and eventually the daycare mostly went away (same number of kids, just more of them ours), she never really saw career/family as an either/or proposition.
Part of that was due to her career choice, as an educator, to be sure. But most of it was due to her mindset. She never ceases to amaze me.
btw, I am a SAHM mom who believes fervently on women having a backup and for them to keep their skills useful and up to date. I’ve seen way too many friends and family members have to deal with situations of infidelity – and not being able to support onesself really ties their hands about options of leaving/staying.
And no, I don’t want to remove teachings of the importance of motherhood. But the *most* important? More important than fatherhood? More important than anything a childless couple could do? I saw a rabbi quote that in their religion they teach the infertile that it just means Heavenly Father has something more important for *them* to do in this life. Refreshing. I’d like to go to the Synagogue on mother’s day.
I also think it’s harder on parents now than it was when I was growing up, where my mom had 7 kids who wandered the neighborhood aimlessly and checked in once or twice a day. Now we’ll get reported to CPS for the same thing.
“I’d like to go to the Synagogue on mother’s day.” Except for the Orthodox, who might attend every day, they will never have services on Mother’s day….. 🙂
And the Orthodox stick to the liturgy.
One of the problem is the very mixed messages that both men and women get.
“The greatest work you will do is within the walls of your home.” Coupled with a sort of Prosperity Gospel that we teach. if you’re righteous, God will bless you materially. And then the role models tend to be successful business people called as Church Leaders. We send the men off to work outside the walls of their home. Leaving it to the wife.
There is a lot of pressure on both genders to fulfill certain roles. Some of it is justified, but some is not.
“More important than anything a childless couple could do? I saw a rabbi quote that in their religion they teach the infertile that it just means Heavenly Father has something more important for *them* to do in this life. Refreshing. I’d like to go to the Synagogue on mother’s day.”
Why not? We go anywhere but to our meetings on mother’s and father’s days. My wife is correct when she says every damn Sunday is Mother’s Day.
Nate, thanks. This is my take, we say we value mothers and the role of stay at home mom or parent. It’s real work, and the most important work, heavenly work, right? Here is the thing, I am the house husband, and yet THAT job is no longer the most important job when it is filled with a man, in fact it is demeaning. If that is true, and in many brothers’ and sisters’ minds it is, then maybe we are showing that deep down inside culturally we still see that parental or home role as less, and the gender (we want to act primarily in that role) as less as well. Demeaning indeed.
I really wish our behaviors matched our talking points.
“I really wish our behaviors matched our talking points.” This should be written in calligraphy, framed, and posted inside every church, not just the LDS ones. And probably inside most businesses, too.
Nate,
Interesting articulation of the cultural gender dynamics in our world. I think you get a lot of it right. One thing I might modify or nuance is the idea of “over-privileged” kids and social expectations surrounding them as a driving problem. One of the big changes that has happened over the last 80 years is the shift to knowledge work and the rise of inequality. Add to that reduced willingness to invest in public institutions such as schools to help and families are in a real bind that I think “over-priviledged” kids doesn’t capture. Parents perceive kids as facing a very competitive, increasingly competitive, race to secure socioeconomic mobility. And there is a structural reality to that. More and more income is being captured by the top 10% which means less for everyone else and more competition over resources. Intesively parenting kids to jump through the hoops and build the real skills to attain these human capital intesive jobs is a response to this world. Families on average are getting less help in this from public institutions like public schools because we both refuse to fund them to take on the increased need for greater human capital training but we have allowed such resources to be shaped by the same inequality driving the competitiveness. For families that means fighting to be able to afford a house in a rich school district or the increasingly popular alternative strategy of intensively home schooling/supplementing your kids education.
I mean I would love to sit back and say, “whatever my kids will be fine. I don’t need to invest in the cultural capital and training that comes with soccer clubs or whatever. Yeah my kid can just float through school and if he/she doesn’t go to a good college, no big deal. There will be plenty of family-sustaining jobs out there for him/her.” That reality just doesn’t exist any more. I wish it did. I think a lot of moms feel this real pressure to help their kids have financially sustainable lives. Then you can add on to it our Mormon culture of achievement and drive for perfection. Our use of successful men as the prototypical “leadership worthy” Mormon etc. It is the world they live in. Then as you and others have mentioned by culturally focusing women on parenting as their *primary* value both now and in the eternities the natural incentives are for people to demonstrate that value. Its a holy mess. I see the kids caught up in all of this not as over-priviledged per se but just facing a really sucky opportunity set and as pinballs in other people’s games. Not that some kids aren’t overprivileged, of course.
In the end I think the long and short of it is that we need to open and clearly legitimate a diversity of family models within the church. One of these models needs to be dual career parents who collaborate together to support their kids emotionally, spiritually and financially as equal partners. We need to let go of the strict gender role rhetoric and give our people the cultural flexibility they need to confront a competitive, complex and increasingly unequal world. The I am Mormon campaigns most striking accomplishment to me was doing exactly this. We should continue down that road.
I could also hope that the church might take a cue from Elder Cook’s talk where he said we as LDS should be at the forefront of innovating and reimagining a family friendly work place. Wouldn’t it be GREAT if we took that seriously (starting by the church adopting forward thinking employment practices). Imagine if we started programs in our wards to help families pool childcare responsibilities with the express goal of helping them having family-friendly dual career households as well as support for single parent households. What if it became politically active in things like living wage campaigns, pushes for European style parental leave etc. What if it looked for opportunities to help make Utah a leading state willing to consider experimenting with chosen family friendly policies? How about just supporting comprehensive funding of schools rather than sitting back and free riding on the extraordinary effort of Mormon mothers (and families) to keep test scores high and the kids mobile as appears to be the case in Utah? I think there is great potential here to leverage both our theology and culture to try and make a real impact on many of things you are proposing. It would be motivating, positive and by trying to solve problems facing so many families even a few wins would do wonders for missionary work and for our brand as the most family-oriented church (way better than staking our claim on denying gays the right to marry). This is the alternative world I wished we lived in.
I and others are even doing our part in trying to create this world. We started http://www.aspiringmormonwomen.org to help support LDS women pursuing their professional dreams as they try and navigate this minefield. Anyone who thinks such a community might be helpful for them check out the blog and look for the facebook group!
Rah, I loved your comment, you’re way ahead of me and your ideas are very compelling.
I have been meaning to comment on this, especially since I HAVE been able to do the part-time-professional-employment gig for most of my career.
First, it is important to keep in mind that even those of us with larger-than-typical families spread out over a longer-than-usual childbearing span will still have many, many years of potential employment before and after, even if we do choose to spend a season in full-time parenting. I have a friend who graduated with her PhD and got her first assistant professor job at age 52, and has gone on to get tenure and land great grants. So yes, prepare our daughters to be anything, and a season as a full-time mom might be part of conquering the world, but the two are not mutually exclusive.
Second, for USAmericans, the current retirement un-system means that few if any of us can afford to have only one spouse employed forever. It would be much harder to save for retirement and a mission with only one person’s 401k.
Third, it may take more self-confidence to be a full-time parent than to have a paid job. It depends on where you live, how common it is, what sort of emotional support is available. So perhaps the only way for someone to feel good about being at home fulltime for a season is if they DO know that they could do anything, but choose to do this.
As a result, as I approach my 34th anniversary of completing undergraduate at BYU, I can say that NONE of the women I went to school with back in the day have remained home after their kidlets were up and out. They went to graduate or professional school, ran for office, have returned to former professions or pursued new passions. I am probably the slacker of all of us. But none of us have found that the decision to be at home for a season was a one-way ticket, which is what it sounds like in the OP.
To be fair, we were at BYU when Marilyn Arnold was a wonderful dean of women, and was always talking about the need to prepare for the future. And we had the opportunity to attend college in the first place.
In my observation, folks who have a needed specialized skill are most likely to be able to have the most control over their work environment, including part-time hours if they so choose. Not just a law degree but an LLM in tax law. Not just a physical therapist, but a pediatric certification. Not just an RN, but a nurse anesthetist.
One of the factors that may confound families nowadays is that while at BYU we were encouraged to consider family demands along with our career goals, today’s students are being told to pursue full-time employment uber alles. I served on the family advisory council for a state-run university that some of my children attended, and was horrified when a speaker at orientation got up and said that liberal arts majors make more money than nurses. This is true depending on the data source, because nurses can be employed part-time if they so choose, and that shifts the overall salaries if not adjusted for FTE. But being a nurse is easier to find a job and choose your employment hours than for a liberal arts major! However, the director of advising insisted that nobody will be employed less than fulltime in the future, and students shouldn’t be thinking about taking time off to possibly have one child (nobody should have more than that!).
Another factor is that for generations, moms could prepare for their empty-nest return to the workforce by taking a university class or two at a time when their own kids were in school. I don’t know how common this is, but my university outlawed that a few years ago, declaring that undergrads had to attend full-time. They have added a few online courses in some fields, but sad to loose the part-time option.
I don’t think that home and work are as separate as “Working Mother” magazine makes out. I never used the term, because I never was a “non-working” mother. I did so much canning, sewing, butchering, managing, etc. that I made a huge contribution to our family fiscal heath.
When I applied for my first job as a project coordinator after years out of the workforce, the guys I ended up working with were in awe that anyone could handle five kids including international travel for my husband’s sabbatical etc. But technically, they should not have used those facts to influence their choice. Our institutional HR does not allow non-paid work to be considered. Even if you raised a million dollars for a charity. Even if you wrote a program to schedule 125 volunteers. Even if you edited an award-winning e-newsletter using the same email marketing service that you would use on the paid job. That is all “not working.” Which is a huge disadvantage for full-time parents.
It might help if there was a movement so that those of us who have been at home and made a successful workforce re-entry wore a ribbon or something so that people could visibly see that it is not impossible to return. I hear that fear so much from young mothers.
Okay, I’ll stop….
These mommy memes, and the emphasis on the role of mothers, could be a conservative response to the gay marriage, and OW debates. Emphasise the traditional conservative position, no matter how little it relates to the reality for modern women. And very little concern for the damage it does to many women.
The fact that they do not put equal effort in to making the US a family friendly place (which would conflict with their political culture), does show their true motivation.The fact that if a government considders gay marriage we expend great effort to oppose it ( defending the family), but if a conservative government removes benifits from the family there is not a peep. This is happening in Australia at present.
Would a work environment where employees were expected to go home by 5 pm, and the exits are locked. Would encouraging factoties, research facilities, etc to be placed so workers lived in rural villages and commuted 10 minutes by bycycle. Would child care provided at the work site, would 6 months paid parental leave. Would 9 weeks paid annual leave, all reduce the stress on families?
There are successfull economies that provide all these benifits, and still compete in the world economy. They put their money where their mouth is, on family friendlyness.
If you aspire to a VW, Porsche, Mercedes, or Audi, it was exported from this economy.
The big difference is whether you have a “lets all combine for the common good” view of your country, or an everyone for themselves, and us against them view which, is also part of the church culture. Which on sounds more Christlike?
I see this idea of emphasis of motherhood, as nothing to do with families, but a political bolstering of what the church believes is the weakness of gay marriage (no women to nurture), and to remind women that they don’t need the priesthood because they have motherhood. Very cynical and political.