Two weeks ago, I began a review of Brigid Schulte's book, Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. I read this excellent examination of the craziness of modern life after learning that several area schools had used it for summer reading and because Schulte was speaking at the Parents Council of Washington last week. I've heard her presentation was terrific. If you went, please share your impressions. In my first column on this topic, I focused on what Schulte calls "the ideal worker." This week, I'm going to focus on a second ideal, "the ideal mother," a similarly unrealistic standard that burdens many of us.
The "ideal mother," "intensive parenting," "concerted cultivation," whatever you want to call it, we have created an unattainable ideal of motherhood, one I have written about often, relying on the work of a variety of people including Jennifer Senior's All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood and Judith Warner's Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. I write about it so often because I worry about what it means for mothers like you and me and for what it means for our children. We engage in this kind of parenting for all the right reasons: we do it because we love our children and we want the best for them. However, its downsides are numerous. Pursuit of the largely unattainable ideal leads to frustration and feelings of inadequacy, neither emotion positioning us to parent with reason, empathy, patience, and love. We feel as though we need to devote every available minute to our children; to do less, could compromise their development and ultimate success in life. This leaves no time for avocations, personal passions, or even much in the way of healthy self-care. Although these pressures play out differently for working and stay-at-home moms, both groups experience them acutely.
Despite all our good intentions, this kind of parenting also hurts children. We do so much managing that we fail to give our children the opportunity to develop independence. Terrified that they may fail, we protect them from that eventuality, in the process preventing them from developing resilience. Ironically, in our anxiety about setting them up for success, we deny them the very qualities that will help ensure success. In addition, we keep them so busy that they don't have time to be bored, to day dream, and to exercise the creative impulses that happen when we have "nothing" to do.
Whether we work outside the home, stay at home, are single or married, we spend more time with our children than mothers did in the 1960's; moreover, not only have we increased the time we spend with our children, we have "increased the intensity of that time, tripling the amount of 'quality' interactive hours spent reading, talking, and playing."(174) Plus, the amount of time we spend with our children directly relates to our educational levels, the more education, the more time with our children. This "ratcheting up" started to happen at the same time that women began moving into the workforce in large numbers. More of us work and work more hours than almost any other country and we do so with the least family-friendly policies in the developed world. At about eleven hours for working mothers and seventeen hours weekly for stay-at-home mothers caring for our children, we give more time to our offspring than any other nation. And caring doesn't include just being with our children which amounts to 42 hours a week for working mothers and 64 for stay-at-home mothers.
Despite all that time, most of us feel guilty, that we're not doing all we should for our children. It all feels terribly like a zero sum game, so we compete with one another, engaging in mommy wars between working and stay-at-home mothers. Working mothers feel as though they have to do everything that stay-at-home moms do, make home-made baked goods, chaperone field trips, volunteer at our children's schools because somehow we believe that if we don't we will not be doing the best by our child. If you've never read Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It, I highly recommend it as a funny, poignant and very accurate story about the life of a working mother in the era of intensive parenting. Meanwhile, some stay-at-home mothers have turned parenting into a profession, with our children as the deliverables (for the extreme manifestation of this phenomenon see Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin).
Schulte argues that we find ourselves in this position for three reasons: guilt, fear, and ambivalence. Working mothers in particular fall prey to guilt because the media frequently tells us we have abandoned our children. And we do have less time to devote to our children. Stay-at-home moms feel guilty because even though they have more time to devote to parenting, the standards are unattainable. Recognizing the competiveness of the world our children will enter, we fear for their futures. Convinced that admission to the most selective college will secure that future, Schulte observes "the intensity superheats as college approaches." College drives so much of our focus on activities, especially sports, music, and dance. We over-program our children in pursuit of that golden ring, the college scholarship. The media has also fed our fears by reporting every child abduction, even though the vast majority of American neighborhoods are very safe. Nonetheless, we feel compelled to watch them constantly instead of sending them outdoors to play as children of another generation did. Lack of clarity about how to define good mothering fuels ambivalence which, she says, "keeps everyone looking over her shoulder, peering across her back fence, comparing, judging, competing and running to check out the latest parenting fad in search of more certainty." (183) With a future that feels unpredictable at best and without a roadmap for success, every decision, down to what kind of diapers to use, feels loaded.
In such an environment, we seek to exert control by doing everything ourselves. Everything has to be perfect and we don't believe that anyone else can do fill in the blank right – fold laundry, stack the dishwasher, make dinner, feed the baby, etc. In particular, we don't think our husbands can do any household or parenting chores properly, so we either nag them about their inadequacies when they fail to meet our standards or we redo what they've done improperly. Pretty soon they give up wanting to help and we find it easier just to do things ourselves, breeding resentment and adding to our sense of overwhelm. This syndrome has earned the term gatekeeping.
While it takes real courage to buck the pressures of the "ideal mother" and doing so bares us to intense disapproval from other mothers, we do, in fact, have control over these obsessive, anxiety-bred behaviors. However, there are other factors that make life difficult, especially for working mothers, over which we have much less control. As Schulte observes, "other than a few targeted programs to help the very poor, there is no U.S. family policy that could help ease the overwhelm for working families." She goes on to point out that "Instead, the United States ranks dead last on virtually every measure of family policy in the world." (98) The complete lack of support for families begins at birth because we count as one of four countries out of 167 that hasn't legislated paid maternity leave. Nor do we have a child-care system that is affordable, convenient, or regulated in a way gives confidence that our children will be safe and well-cared for. The lack of these policies means that beginning with pregnancy, having children and working creates a stressful combination for mothers. Unless we work for a company with a paid maternity leave policy or live in California, New Jersey or Rhode Island, the three states with mandated paid maternity leave, we have to manage a pay cut at exactly the time that expenses increase. We also have to struggle to find child care in a haphazard and partially unregulated system where good childcare exists but tends to be very expensive and oversubscribed. The difficulty of securing high quality, affordable childcare and worrying about whether our children are being well cared for obviously contribute to a sense of overwhelm. The message is very clear: as working families, we are on our own.
When we combine the expectations of the "ideal worker" with the expectations of the "ideal mother" while offering no support for working families, it's no wonder we feel overwhelmed. We live with the tyranny of unrealistic expectations in an environment hostile towards working mothers in which we also act in hostile ways towards each other. We understandably feel at the mercy of forces beyond our control, a guaranteed way to make people feel unhappy and beleaguered. Schulte does, however, have some solutions for us. Next week.
We are delighted to announce that Rebecca Chan '17 received recognition for her exemplary volunteer service with a President's Volunteer Service Award. The award, which recognizes Americans of all ages who have volunteered significant amounts of their time to serve their communities and their country, was granted by the Prudential Spirit of Community Awards program on behalf of President Barack Obama. Rebecca's community service commitments have included serving as a figure skating instructor for children with intellectual disabilities, working at Walter Reed National Military Center at special events in support of veterans and those currently serving our country, and most recently volunteering on the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Walter Reed. Rebecca also earned a Gold Level President's Volunteer Service Award in 2015. Congratulations and thanks to Rebecca for her impressive and inspiring service on behalf of those in need!
Eva Gobourne
