Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)
PART IV
Fatherhood
18
Your Role in the Mommy Wars
As a husband and dad, you’re going to face the complicated challenge of balancing work and family. At some point early in your parenthood adventure, if the family finances can handle it, you and your wife may contemplate whether you want one of you to stay home and take care of the new baby or little tykes.
You may have strong opinions on whether you want your wife to work outside the home or to be a stay-at-home mom. Ideally, you and your wife can talk honestly about this. If you’re going to try to persuade her, and you want to avoid the need to dodge hurled objects from a woman who has probably not had a good night’s sleep in several months to a year, you had better start with, “I trust you to make the right decision on this, but I feel strongly that… .”
As a husband, you’ve got two jobs in this situation. The first is to try to help your wife find the option that works best for her and the family as a whole. The second job is to nod sympathetically when she encounters other women who will trigger volcanic rage by implicitly or explicitly criticizing her decisions.
And believe me, they will. For some reason, the discussion about mothers who work and mothers who stay at home hits every mom’s sensitive nerve with metronomic regularity. Have you witnessed women fighting on Facebook over working moms versus stay-at-home moms? It makes WWE look like William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Ye gods, what a nasty, vicious, raging ideological war! The passive-aggressive denunciations get so furious that both Sunni and Shia clerics are telling them, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, ladies, calm down. Everybody step back a bit. This is really escalating out of control.”
This is a deep-rooted, passionate, merciless fight that is not easily understood by outsiders. Kind of like the Balkans. For some reason, when a woman writes, “I made choice A,” every woman who made choice B sees the words, “You’re not as good a mother as I am.” Maybe there’s something wrong with Facebook’s site, and it’s mixed up with Google Translate.
Maybe the easily triggered passions about this issue reveal the extraordinarily difficult pressures women put on themselves. They want to be good mothers, and they want to have thriving, successful, fulfilling careers as well. What’s more, they want other people to think of them as being good mothers and thriving, fulfilled professionals, too. They may think that making either choice will be interpreted as a concession on one front. Work, and you’re insufficiently devoted to your kids. Stay at home, and you’re admitting you just couldn’t make it in the working world.
Whether or not any of your wife’s friends, siblings, neighbors, and coworkers actually feel that way, there’s a good chance your wife will sense somebody, somewhere is disapproving of the choices she’s made. Silent judgment is hard to disprove.
Women will accuse us men of being irrational and hot-tempered, but we get upset over really important things, like Fantasy Football, which beer to bring to the barbeque, and whether the guy in front of us used a turn signal.
In a better world, there would be a universal recognition that being a working mom is one of the hardest roles anyone can step into today. (A close second: a working dad.) Everyone would understand that different families will find different arrangements that work best for them. And everyone would understand that working parents get up every morning, do the best they can, and will inevitably make mistakes. The missed PTA meeting, Junior’s trip to the principal’s office, the embarrassing public tantrum—these reflect momentary and fixable problems on the home front, not an indictment of a parent’s choice.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in that better, more understanding world, and we probably never will. You can’t control all of that; the only thing you can control is yourself, and what you do when some friend of your wife responds with a disbelieving “oh” to her post-birth plans.
You want to support your wife from a quiet, perhaps obscured background location. You’re her sniper. Feed her the appropriate social science research and anecdotal evidence indicating that kids raised in the way she chose turn out fine. Whatever you do, you don’t want to get directly involved in these fights. These discussions have more landmines than the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, and as a man, many women will conclude that your Y chromosome makes it impossible for you to understand anything about this issue.
I will say, however, that even though there aren’t a lot of them, a lot less heat gets generated over stay-at-home dads. You don’t see stay-at-home dads accusing working dads of being bad fathers. And I haven’t encountered any working dads who denounce stay-at-home dads who ditch the rat race and devote themselves to taking care of their kids; they never say they’re wasting their lives and educations.
Here’s our dirty little secret: we don’t really care what other guys do. Half the time, we’re not even listening.
I realize there’s a good chance that just offering this opinion will get something thrown at me, but maybe a strategic lack of interest in other people’s lives would serve us all well.
What Would Ward Cleaver Do?
Well, Ward didn’t have to do anything; it was June who made the “choice” to stay at home, as most moms did in those days. But if Ward were alive today, he’d know the wisdom of staying mum on whatever Mom decided to do.
Don’t Outsource Parenting
Over the course of our five kids, my wife has been a college student, a working mom, a stay-at-home mom, and a work-from-home mom. I’ve always worked, but during the course of our marriage my work schedule has varied from going to work at 4 a.m. to ending my workday at midnight. For most people it’s less about making choices about if you’re going to stay home or how many hours you’re going to work than just doing the best you can in the circumstances you’re given. We’re lucky in that we’ve finally reached what for us is the ideal setup. My wife is able to telecommute, and I work nearby, which means we can both attend school functions and help out with doctor’s and dentist’s visits. But I know not many people can do what we do.
There’s some evidence, in fact, that big corporations are pulling back from telecommuting.* The decline in birthrates, especially among Millennials, means companies don’t have to be as family-friendly as they did a generation ago. Some of the big corporate campuses seem designed to keep you at your job as long as possible with services and amenities like dry cleaning, doctor’s offices, and food courts (as well as day care, it should be noted) offered on site.
And, maybe not surprising, just as some corporations offer on-site day care, the state is eager to step in too, from pushing to lower the age your kids start school, to extending the hours they stay there, to making school year-round, to now proposing state-run boarding schools that take over the role of parents almost completely.
Daniel B. Wood, “No More Telecommuting? Not a Problem for Most American Workers,” Christian Science Monitor, March 5, 2013, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2013/0305/No-more-telecommuting-Not-a-problem-for-most-American-workers.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argued in support of public boarding schools at the National Summit on Youth Violence Prevention in 2015. Certain kids, he said, the government needs to control “24/7 to really create a safe environment and give them a chance to be successful.” Certain kids. Not yours. Well, probably not yours. Duncan explained that he was talking about kids “where there’s not a mom, there’s not a dad, there’s not a grandma, there’s just nobody at home.” Actually, that sounds like child abandonment; the state is already allowed to intervene in cases like that. But Duncan didn’t talk about the need for more state-run orphanages; he talked about “public boarding schools.”
Duncan might have in mind what Buffalo, New York, school board member Carl Paladino has been pushing for: public boarding schools for children, starting in elementary school. “We have teachers and union leaders telling us, ‘the problem is with the homes; these kids are in dysfunctional homes.’”* When you consider that the state is pretty dysfunctional itself, particularly in these failing school districts, blaming dysfunctional parents sounds like a classic case of blame-shifting in order to justify a governmental power grab of sweeping proportions. Buffalo, for instance, has the nation’s third-highest per-pupil expenditure rate, according to the Buffalo News.**The district spent $26,903 per student in 2010, yet its graduation rate of 55 percent in 2014 was nearly twenty points lower than the New York state average. Test scores are well below the state average in virtually all subjects and for all grade levels. When Governor Andrew Cuomo released a list of 177 “failing schools” in the state in his 2015 report “The State of New York’s Failing Schools,” forty-five out of the fifty-seven schools in the Buffalo public school system were named. That sounds pretty dysfunctional to me. I’d start looking at ways to get students out of these schools, not ways to keep them there 24/7.
Carolyn Thompson, “Buffalo Considers Public Boarding Schools to Solve Education Issues,” Huffington Post, April 27, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/27/buffalo-public-boarding-schools_n_7152716.html.
Mary Pasciak, “Buffalo’s School Spending Is Nation’s Third Highest,” Buffalo News, September 13, 2012, http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?aid=/20120913/cityandregion/120919509.
Whether you work from home, work outside the home, or make parenting your full-time job, we all have this in common: our kids are at home. Oh sure, there may be the occasional sleepover, summer camp, or even boarding school or exchange program for our kids once they’re older. We’re not, however, packing our kids up and shipping them off a few blocks away at the age of six or seven. Maybe we should forget about the Mommy Wars and find our common ground in defense of parenting itself against outsourcing it to a failing public school system.