It's Mother's Day this weekend here in the U.S. (Happy
Mother's Day, Mom!), and the event has me thinking a lot about moms,
careers, family, and our social expectations. I'm not a mother myself,
but I have a lot of respect for those women who manage to juggle both
family and career. I honestly don't know how they do it...
[Photo: Lily Pulitzer Barbie & Stacey by Mattel]
It has to be difficult to have to choose between ambition in the workplace and the family waiting for you at home. There was a time, or so I'm told, when a woman's success was judged primarily (by society anyway) by her success as a wife and a mother. Any work she did outside the home was considered "extra" and had little to do with her community's opinion of her.
Of course, back then her husband's success was judged almost entirely by his success in his career. If the woman's job was to nurture, the man's job was to provide a good income, perhaps along with some yard work and home repairs on the weekends. (But even there, it was acceptable for him to pay someone else to handle such household responsibilities.)
I certainly wouldn't want to go back to that era, but it's worth recognizing that there are aspects of that arrangement that were simpler than the social expectations we live with today. When men and women had to choose between career and family, society sent a clear message to each gender about that choice.
Today, things aren't so clear. Women today are judged (and therefore judge themselves) by their successes in both career and family life. And while our expectations of men as fathers have shifted toward more parental leanings, the genders are still treated differently. Child care is still largely considered to be a female responsibility.
Now, our need for self-respect and our need to be socially accepted are deeply rooted needs, hard-wired into our emotional brains. But what we need to do in order to meet these needs is largely determined by the culture in which we live. If we tell women - through all manner of cultural messages - that both arenas matter, then women with both career and family are caught between a rock and a hard place. It isn't just their time they have to manage - it's also the attitudes of the people around them.
So here's my hope for women this Mother's Day: that as a culture we will shift our expectations of men as well, so that the challenge will at least fall equally on male and female shoulders. If we encouraged men more openly in their success as both financial provider and care giver, then couples would have a far better chance of managing to provide both to their children - not to mention the fact that sharing these responsibilities more equally would do a lot to hold marriages together.
[Photo: Loving Family Dollhouse by Fisher-Price]
Children, as wonderful as they are, have been shown statistically to place a huge stress on a marriage. Before children, modern couples tend to be focused together on making money and providing for their needs as a couple. After children, modern women tend to become torn between career and family, while modern men all too often expect those women to bear the brunt of the child-rearing responsibilities.
I'm not just talking about diapers, although taking turns at the less appealing aspects of infant care is an excellent start. I'm also talking about doctor visits, parent-teacher conferences, homework, shopping for school clothes, violin lessons, school plays, adolescent break-ups, and the entire range of what it takes to be intimately involved in a child's physical, emotional and even spiritual development. Why shouldn't working men face the same social expectations as working women when it comes to being fully engaged in their children's lives?
For those people who might think (and this is social programming talking, by the way), "But a child's relationship with the mother is more important than the relationship with the father when it comes to their emotional development," well that just isn't true. Mothers may have stronger urges to care for infants at first, due to hormonal changes that occur during pregnancy and after birth. But fathers also have a strong connection with their children. And new studies are suggesting that a father's influence on his or her children lasts far into adulthood - for both boys and girls.
The new book "The Father Factor" by Stephan Poulter suggests that children's career success as adults has a lot to do with the parenting style of the father who raised them. Other studies have shown that a woman's choice of husbands - whether caring, cold or even abusive - can be statistically linked to a father's compassionate presence and emotional involvement throughout her childhood, or on the negative side to his abuse, disinterest or absence.
As a society, if we are to strengthen the institution of marriage and provide for the emotional needs of the next generation, we need to start holding both parents accountable for their children's day-to-day needs. Working men need to be engaged in the same balancing act as working women - juggling both the financial and emotional needs of their children at home.
We've come a long way in this direction since the 1950s, but for the sake of both marriages and children, we need to keep pushing that envelope. Yes, parents need to pay the bills, but children also need their parents' attention at home. To the great men and women who work together to make both of these things happen - men and women who understand that keeping up with the Joneses isn't half as important as a child's feeling of being loved - on this Mother's Day, I salute you.
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