Stay-at-Home Mothers: Plague Upon the Earth

No, really. That’s the contention that Gretchen Ritter, director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas makes today in the Austin American-Statesman (free, but quite personal, registration required).

Rosemary, the QOAE delivers a very concise rebuttal to Ms. Ritter’s article. I wanted to expand on her views.

Read on in the extended comments.

First, I have to give a little bit of a disclaimer and provide my credentials. I’m the oldest child of a large family. My father worked and my mother stayed home and took care of us. They did this not only for me but for several children over the space of more than 20 years. Several of my neighborhood friends also had stay-at-home Moms but more than a few were also “latchkey kids”. This was the early 1970s, when the phenomenon of the latchkey kid was really just getting started. I know full well how children with stay-at-home Moms can fare and how well latchkey kids can fare also. I lived it my entire childhood.

It’s obvious to me that Ms. Ritter has no real experience with SAHMs. I’m not asking that she be one herself, just perhaps have one as a friend or be acquainted with one well enough that they know what she does during her average day. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with a SAHM would not be able to make the assertions Ms. Ritter does with a straight face.

So what does she have to say? Ms. Ritter believes that SAHMs are harmful to children and society and she rests her assertions on several points which she states as fact. So let’s go through them.

It denies men the chance to be involved fathers. This is a loss for them and a loss for their children. What does it mean when fathers are denied the opportunity to nurture their kids in ways that are as important as their work? What do the children miss when they don’t have fathers changing their diapers, picking them up from school, coaching soccer, making breakfast or dinner and doing homework with them? On both sides, the answer is too much.

Okay, so what father is unable to do these things because he has a job? Does a job prohibit a father from changing a diaper at 9 in the evening? Did I miss where soccer practices often end as Father is due home from work, allowing him to stop by and pick up his kids on the way home? Dad can’t make breakfast or dinner why?

My father worked a full-time job just outside of Washington, DC. He had a 45-minute commute most days. As I grew up Dad was my Cub Scout Den Leader, my Boy Scout Pack Leader, and my soccer coach. When he wasn’t doing those things he showed up at football practices when I was in high school, helped me build birdhouses taught me how to block and rush the quarterback, showed me how to build a pinewood derby race car, and a hundred other things. Oh, did I mention that he was a Deacon at our church, had a successful jail ministry, and was the church songleader for a couple years, too? Yeah, and on top of that he even sat down and did homework with us sometimes, too and cooked on the weekends (always a fine adventure).

Ms. Ritter, if you believe that a SAHM prevents a Dad from being a Dad, you’re blind to what parents do every day for what’s important to them. But that’s an issue we’ll be coming back to a couple more times in this post.

Women who stay at home also lose out — they lose a chance to contribute as professionals and community activists. Parenting is an important social contribution. But we need women in medicine, law, education, politics and the arts. It is not selfish to want to give your talents to the broader community — it is an important part of citizenship to do so, and it is something we should expect of everyone.

Hmm….let’s pass over the use of the word “activist” here, since that seems to speak to a certain mindset that seems incompatible to me with the entire concept of being a SAHM and move on the her broader topic. Okay, so being a SAHM prevents a woman from making contributions outside her house. I’m wondering how Ms. Ritter managed to miss the women who daily work part-time jobs and still manage to be there to pick up their children from school, who have used their God-given inventiveness to work from their homes, who volunteer every day in their childrens’ schools, and who give tens of hours a week to community organizations and churches.

Back to the personal examples. My Mother was active in the local PTA and in our church. She was a Sunday School teacher, used her expertise with children (gathered from raising them as a SAHM by the way) to run the church nursery, sang in the choir, came to all our soccer games, helped organize Cub Scout and Boy Scout bake sales and other exhibits. Was my mother professional? Damned skippy she was. Did she contribute to her community? Every single day.

Of course, Ms. Riter believes that SAHMs are prisoners of their homes. That’s far from true for a woman who wishes to be otherwise.

Full-time mothering is also bad for children. It teaches them that the world is divided by gender. This sends the wrong message to our sons and daughters. I do not want our girls to grow up thinking they must marry and have children to be successful, or that you can only be a good mother if you give up your work.

Nor do I want boys to think that caring for families is women’s work and making money is men’s work. Our sons and daughters should grow up thinking that raising and providing for a family is a joint enterprise among all the adults in the family.

Oh no! The world isn’t divided by gender?? Holy crap, my eyes have been deceiving me for 36 years, then, because I could have sworn that we had males and females and there actually was a difference between the two. No, this is certainly not the philosophy that Ms. Ritter wishes people to have. It is horrible for little girls to grow up thinking that being a good wife and mother is a noble and worthy thing. It’s far beyond the pale for these girls to learn that you can be a good SAHM and a rounded and good person at the same time. Those are the messages Ms. Ritter does not want little girls to have – reality be damned.

But you know, there’s a lot of flat-out lie in that paragraph. Being a SAHM doesn’t teach children what Ms. Ritter say sit does. What it does teach is that every person has a role to play in how their family operates and that only by working together for what is important to them will a family grow and prosper. It’s that simple. Ms. Ritter wants to boil the SAHM world down into black and white stereotypes that by and large do not exists in the real world. Raising a family takes work and cooperation. Raising a family with a SAHM takes as much, if not more work and cooperation. It requires a significant amount of sacrifice and focus on priorities, just as it always has. What is comes down to is what’s important: your desires or the well-being of your children? And about that last point Ms. Ritter has much to say.

The new stay-at-home motherhood movement parallels the movement to create the “perfect” child. It’s not just that mothers are home with their children; they are engaged with their children constantly so they will “develop” properly. Many middle-class parents demand too much of their children. We enroll them in soccer, religious classes, dance, art, piano, French lessons, etc., placing them on the quest for continuous self-improvement.

Many of these youngsters end up stressed out. Children should think it is all right to just hang out and be kids sometimes. They should learn that parents have interests separate from their lives as parents. And we should all learn that mothers are not fully responsible for who their children become — so are fathers, neighbors, friends, the extended family and children themselves.

I’m not sure which families Ritter is talking about here. The families she describes are the families that exist right now, without SAHMs. The parents, busy with working and their own pursuits and driven to Keeping Up with the Jones’ are hell-bent on making sure their children are in the best activities in the best places, cost and family togetherness be damned. And many of these after-school programs have a great benefit: the child is busy elsewhere attended by some other adult so the parents can keep on working.

Guess what? That ain’t the life in a SAHM family. There’s no additional pressure in these houses to raise the perfect child. In fact, my own experience is that there’s much less a demand for material possessions and status than elsewhere. And the child has the warm comfort of knowing that Mom or Dad will be there to get them from school. Don’t think that’s important? Guess again.

Finally, the stay-at-home mother movement is bad for society. It tells employers that women who marry and have children are at risk of withdrawing from their careers, and that men who marry and have children will remain fully focused on their careers, regardless of family demands. Both lessons reinforce sex discrimination.

This movement also privileges certain kinds of families, making it harder for others. The more stay-at-home mothers there are, the more schools and libraries will neglect the needs of working parents, and the more professional mothers, single mothers, working-class mothers and lesbian mothers will feel judged for their failure to be in a traditional family and stay home their children.

Oh bunk. Employers have known for years that employees with families will make career decisions based on what is best for their families. That’s been true for as long as one person have paid another person to work for them. But I’m wondering how Ms. Ritter is able to assert that SAHMs are bad for society. Is she saying that American society from its origin to the 1970s was one long, colossal failure? Does she contend that a society that has done more in the world for human and civil rights than any other nation, that twice fought to save the world from tyranny, that is the only country to land a man on the moon, that today peers to the very edge of the Universe, that fought a war to restore the dignity of black and end slavery, among things – does she contend that that society has failed because for the overwhelming majority of its history, mothers stayed at home to raise children? One would think that is something were bad for society, it ought to have had a detrimental effect on the accomplishments of that society somehow, don’t you?

Ah but here we come toward the real crux of her argument. SAHMs are bad because they make other people feel bad. SAHMs should sacrifice the raising of their children to help the self-esteem of every other sort of mothering technique we can imagine. Guess what, folks? Mothering is a choice. You choose how you wish to do it and you handle your decision. It’s not my job, nor the job of any mother, to make any other mother feel good about how she raises her child. See, what Ms. Ritter is not telling you is that the most successful way to raise children, the way that is far more likely to produce a happy and well-adjusted citizen of this country, is the SAHM way. But that means that the “more professional mothers, single mothers, working-class mothers and lesbian mothers” are choosing a way that’s not as effective. That’s not to say that any of these other types of mothers can’t raise great kids. They certainly can. But they will never, ever raise a child well so long as they buy into the simpering victimhood Ms. Ritter heaps on them.

And that’s the thing, really. Ms. Ritter’s version of motherhood purports to support strong and vital women who are capable of anything and contribute greatly to the world around them. In reality, the women of her world swoon at the mere sight of a SAHM, incapable of doing anything but “feel judged” by them. Let me tell you something, Ms. Ritter. The average SAHM is way too busy raising her kids and contributing to the community around her to judge anything that isn’t an elementary school art contest or a tussle between her two would-be WWE Superstar sons.

But Ms. Ritter’s not done fastening up that victim hairshirt quite yet.

By creating an expectation that mothers could and should stay home, we lose sight of the fact that most parents do work — and that they need affordable, high quality child care, after-school enrichment programs and family leave policies that allow mothers and fathers to nurture their children without giving up work.

And here, folks, is what’s really important. What do SAHMs prove? They prove that it is possible for a family to exist on one salary without a plethora of government handouts. SAHMs deny the need for government-endorsed and funded child care, government after-school programs, and government-mandated family leave policies. They are living proof that the government is not at all necessary to raise your child. All you need are a pair of parents dedicated to the task, willing to sacrifice to make sure it happens, and ready to give every ounce of love in their hearts for them.

How do I know this? Because I have a Mom and a Dad who are living refutations of every single thing Ms. Ritter believes to be true in her article. I know she’s full of bunk because my parents, and plenty of parents around me, proved it to me every day of my life.

UPDATE: I put this up on the OTB Beltway Traffic Jam.

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