Family Changes as Moms Go to Work

The new, compelling sense that the world is more dangerous and that parents are more alone combines with other attitudes that have their roots in a major social change. At a median age of forty-four, most of the interviewed parents have lived through the enormous increase of womens labor force participa­tion in the last half of the last century. Those born in the early sixties, for example, would have experienced a world where the labor force participation rates of married women with children under age eighteen rose from less than 40 percent to over 70 percent (in the 1990s), before dropping down to some­what below 70 percent in the early twenty-first century.11 This increase in the labor force participation of mothers is more marked among the elite than it is among those who are less privileged (where womens work outside the home has longer been the norm), even as it is found among all social classes; this increase is also more marked among white women than it is among women of color, even as it is found among all racial/ethnic groups. Parents view this rise in the labor force involvement of women with children as yet another reason why parenting has become so much more difficult.12

Many respondents waxed sentimental about having had a stay-at-home mother. Kevin Hansen, a fifty-three-year-old, white doctor from Missouri and the now-widowed father of three children (seventeen-year-old twin girls and a twenty-three-year-old son), remembered that in his parents’ generation “the mom was usually home during the day,” and he insisted that this meant that a mother was “always available, and there was more contact between the mom and the kids.” Indeed, so strong is the “memory” of a world where mothers stayed home and solved all daily problems that it is recalled even by respon­dents for whom this was not the case.’3 For example, a white, forty-nine-year — old, middle-class mother of two daughters remembered that in her childhood “parents were around more” and then, as an aside, added, “although actually my mother did work.” Erica Harper, the school psychologist from a small Ver­mont city, similarly noted simultaneously that her mother “stayed home” and that although her mother worked outside the home, she was certain to leave work in time to be home with the children after school. And a thirty-three — year-old, single, white, middle-class mother of one eleven-year-old daugh­ter, when asked what problems her parents faced, responded simply that her “mom was a stay-at-home mom.” She spoke as if that fact were sufficient evidence that her parents did not have significant problems, even though, as is true of her today, she acknowledged that they had to “struggle. . . sometimes for money.”

Updated: 02.11.2015 — 05:43