Although we hear a daily drumbeat from the national media telling us that the American social structure is now permanently stratified with mothers in the labor force and children in day care centers, a careful monitoring of newspapers reveals plenty of evidence that this is not a satisfactory pattern. There are two reasons: mothers don’t like it and babies don’t like it.
Take, for one example, a feature story in a Chicago newspaper about Susan Anderson, a successful television anchor woman who chucked her job in order to stay home with her two children. In her own by-line article, she described how she agonized between career and children, and how she made the choice she did.
Susan Anderson had invested 15 years in a smashingly glamorous career at one of the largest television stations in one of the largest markets in the country. She would face a significant drop in her living standards if she gave up her six-figure salary.
She knew that broadcasting is a very competitive, youth-oriented business. It had been hard enough to get hired in her mid-20s, but it would be lots tougher if she dropped out and tried to go back in her mid-40s.
She even had a supportive husband who was willing to cut back his legal practice so he could spend more time at home. He was quite willing to live with any decision Susan made.
But then, she looked ahead into the future and thought of the many who have wished they had spent more time with their children. Has anyone ever lamented on his death bed, “I wish I’d spent more time on business?”
The punch line of her article was, “I just could not shake an almost primal feeling. It wasn’t so much that I thought my kids needed me more than the job allowed, but that I needed them more.”
Now, for a contrast, look at a “piece of my mind” article from the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was written by a woman surgeon who made the opposite decision — to stick with her career. But she wasn’t happy with her choice.
Dr. Margaret Levy wrote, “When I was a medical student, I was naive enough to believe that I could do everything I wanted to do.” She tried to have a rewarding career in medicine, which she loves, and at the same time raise a family.
“Let me tell you, once and for all,” writes Dr. Levy, “that this is neither physically nor psychologically possible. Take my word for it.” Whatever arrangement the career woman makes for her children, she says, “call it anything but Mom.”
Dr. Levy has two young sons. When she looked at her friends’ “day-care kids,” whom she described as absolutely pathetic, no matter how good the day care is, she knew she had to have another alternative.
Since her career track as a surgeon offered a better lifestyle, financially speaking, than her husband’s, he gallantly stayed home for eight years to provide parental care.
But Dr. Levy still isn’t happy. Like most working mothers, she admits to being in a constant state of exhaustion and frustration. Most of all, she admits to being envious of all the time her husband has had with the children.
Here’s how Dr. Levy describes her current situation: “I am not a liberated woman. I am incarcerated in a world and lifestyle far more complex and complicated than my great-grandmother (raising her 11 children in an apartment in the Bronx) could have imagined.”
Now comes the Wall Street Journal, with its first anti-feminist article since the early 1970s. “As more working parents entrust their infants to day care,” the article stated, “some researchers are warning that day care at too early an age may psychologically harm a child.”
The Journal interviewed Professor Jay Belsky, a Pennsylvania State University psychologist, whose recent research shows that infant day care undermines a child’s sense of trust, of security, of order in the world.
What makes Belsky more newsworthy than the millions of mothers who have always known that fact is that, in the 1970s, he helped forge an academic consensus that day care generally benefits a child.
Professor Belsky announced his change of mind at an American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in 1985, and he’s been writing articles in that vein ever since. He says that various studies show toddlers in day care to be insecure, more anxious, aggressive, hyperactive, and more likely to cry and misbehave at ages 9 and 10.
