A mother who is at home all the time with infants and toddlers is often very busy. Feedings need to be given, diapers need to be changed, and babies need to be bathed, cuddled, and cooed to. However, as a society we have a schizophrenic attitude toward mothers who are out of the labor market and taking care of their young. Many people believe as Mary Eberstadt, author of “Home-Alone America†writes, that “children are happiest and safest when they are under the close supervision of mommy and daddy.†Nevertheless, we seem to want to deprive those children who are already most deprived – the impoverished – of that sort of care. We often criticize mothers (less frequently fathers) for not spending 24/7 with young children if those mothers are married to men who make enough money to support the family. But all-too-often we are even more critical of poor mothers who DO stay home if they depend on the government for support. Indeed, the difference between how much we respect moms at home has little relationship to their quality of mothering but is often based entirely on their source of support.
It seems to me that if there are ANY mothers who should have the option of staying home with infants and toddlers, it should be those of the lower classes. Recent studies found that a larger minority of children in daycare were described as “aggressive†than those cared for by mommies and that day care kids have higher rates of illness (I believe the studies also showed that the day care children had slightly higher academic scores than their at-home counterparts and that they had lower rates of illness once they got into school). Aggressiveness in a middle- or upper-class child might lead to CEOs and fire-in-the-belly politicians but tend to be predictive of thugs among the poor.
Workfare is a popular program but it seems to be based on the idea that stay-at-home motherhood is not “real work.†Thus, moms must leave very small children in daycare centers so the mothers can clean hotel rooms, wait tables, interrupt meals to read telemarketing scripts – and care for other people’s children in daycare centers. Unlike “career women,†those in the aforementioned jobs do not tend to have invested a lot of resources in training for their occupations, may not find their work particularly gratifying, and many would gladly give it up to take care of their young fulltime. What’s more, they may come home from their jobs exhausted and dispirited and transmit these negative feelings to their kids.
Even while I advocate making it possible for all mothers to have the option of staying home fulltime, I want to make it clear that no mother should be socially pressured to stay home regardless of class. [And no, PolishKnight, I don’t believe the way to make this possible is to rescind women’s right to vote or encourage or permit employment discrimination against us.]
For SOME mothers, even a humble job might be preferable to fulltime mothering. Work outside the home may allow adult contact that is psychologically beneficial. It also may be a plus in feeding a sense of competency. A study by Myra Marx Ferree in 1976 of 135 women about evenly divided between fulltime homemakers and those who worked outside of the home had interesting findings in this respect. Those who worked outside the homes were not in glamour jobs or high-powered professions but were store clerks, waitress, typists, and the like. Those with paid jobs were happier and more satisfied than those without. Ferree found that most of the housewives rated themselves as poor at homemaking – as did the wives who worked outside of the home. However, none of those at paid jobs felt they were poor at them and over half felt they were very good at them. Ferree concluded that the lack of a set criteria for a job well done tended to work against the self-esteem of the stay-at-home group. Finally, there are probably families in which mom and kids do best with a break from each other’s constant company. I once worked in a boiler room in which we did telemarketing for credit cards. I asked one woman how she liked her job and she replied, “Gets me away from the kids for a few hours.â€ÂÂ
While we should not pressure moms to stay home fulltime, we need to recognize that a stay-at-home-mom deserves respect regardless of whether her source of support is a husband, a boyfriend, a lesbian lover (or wife if she lives in Massachusetts), a trust fund, an inheritance, savings – or the government. It will be objected that, “the government didn’t create the kids. Mom and Dad did.†Very true. But Mom and Dad are far from the only ones to live with the results of how children are raised. If parental care is usually or even often advantageous, then it is in our interest as a culture to make it possible for the children most “at-risk†of turning into troubled adults – the children of the poor – to have stay-at-home parents.
The term “welfare mother†should be retired from the language. We don’t call moms who are dependent on husbands “husband mothers.†Regardless of her source of support, the proper job description for a mother who is with her children all the time should be “stay-at-home-mom.â€ÂÂ
