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On her husband’s campaign trail in 1992, Hillary Clinton came under serious fire for the following statement: “You know, I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life. ”
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Clinton was so lambasted for that statement, I suppose, because it seemed as though she was saying that she had done the “hard” thing by staying in the business sector while her husband was Governor, and that being a full-time wife and mother was a cakewalk or the refuge of women without larger ambition.
Obviously all kinds of women choose to become stay-at-home mothers. Rates of childbirth are growing currently among both women with advanced degrees and women with a high school diploma or less — how many of those women are happily choosing to remain at home is unknown.
But what about the women who do stay at home? Nancy J. Hirschmann has written an article entitled “Mothers Who Care Too Much: What Feminists Get Wrong About Family, Work and Equality,” which appears to argue that mothers who make raising their children their number one profession are coddling and defending their children so much that they’re raising a generation of blameless narcissists. Hirschmann claims:
We hear a lot about the evils of working mothers . . . But we don’t often talk—either within the academy or outside of it—about the comparable failings of full-time mothering, about the women . . . who devote their lives to caring for their families, while producing outcomes that arguably undermine such basic political values as freedom, equality, and engaged citizenship.
The article opens with a number of examples: in one, a mother pulls a Ferris Bueller and writes her daughter’s Professor a note saying that her daughter needs to attend a memorial service for a close family friend so her kid can actually participate in the sorority rush week. Another mother argued that, despite the fact that her son had clearly plagiarized his essay, he couldn’t be a cheater because she knew she had raised a good boy. And finally, perhaps the most appalling was the Mother who asked if, before her daughter attended trial for the vehicular manslaughter of a sixteen-year-old girl due to cell phone use while driving, the girl could spend the summer in Paris.
Okay, I get it. All of these examples are ridiculous and appalling. But is it fair to say that this behavior is restricted to full-time mothers? Isn’t this a problem with parents in general?
In the Coen Brothers’ last film A Serious Man, the lead character, a Professor of mathematics, is blackmailed by the father of a boy who failed a recent exam. A friend of mine who works as a Teaching Assistant once told me that, after failing a student who never came to class and handed in only about half of her assignments, the girl’s father came in and screamed at her that she was unfairly failing his daughter who was just doing her best. Sure, a couple of exceptions don’t disprove the rule, but they do call it into question.
While Hirschmann makes some great points, there are children from all kinds of awful family situations who are able to find their own moral compasses. Sure, that girl’s mother shouldn’t have written her daughter an excuse note, but then her daughter — presumably over the age of 18 — should not have blown off her assignment for rush week.
Ironically, by placing the blame on parenting, Hirschmann is perpetuating the sense that these children are free from responsibility. After all, we’re not talking about eight-year-olds, we’re talking about the grown children of these parents. At what point is it their responsibility to figure out right from wrong?
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It’s not the stay at home vs working mother that’s the problem, it’s the helicopter parents that destroy kids. Think of your child as milk, if it’s spoiled people will run gagging from it.
It can happen to kids regardless of what their mothers do. I suspect there are more helicopter parents that stay home with their kids, but I don’t think it’s because of that. A person likely to be hyper-involved in their kid’s life is simply more likely to choose to stay home in the first place. That doesn’t mean some women with outside careers aren’t just as bad.
For a lot of it, I think it is fair to blame the parents. The kids really don’t have any responsibility, because they don’t know how to, because they’ve never been given a chance to. I had parents that tried to work this way, and it was only my extreme tendency to independence that kept me from ending up as one of these stories.
Parents! Teach your child to function in the world, then let them go forth and do it! You’ll help them a lot more than if you do all the work yourself. Remember that old ‘teach a man to fish’ analogy? I’m back to full-time with kids, and I can’t believe how young kids are these days. The abilities I would expect in an eight-year-old are only sometimes present in a twelve-year-old. It’s terrible!
Congratulations to those of you who manage to buck the trend. It can’t be easy these days!
[...] Do Full-Time Mothers Raise Irresponsible Children? – Zelda Lily [...]
My mom worked full time and did a bunch of after work stuff after having me and my brother. She and my dad took turns dropping us off/picking us up from school and our babysitters’, who were there for us from age 6 mo until 14. It was like having a second set of parents.
All of these people worked incredibly hard to have what they did, which wasn’t much. We were raised to respect other other people and manage money well and take responsibility for all our own actions.
My aunt likes to talk a lot of shit about my mom being a bad parent for working instead of staying at home with us, but I am quite happy with the way we were raised, and honestly, we are more responsible people than my cousins.
I think the issue has more to do with how parents treat each other, manage responsibilities and discipline their kids than whether or not someone is a full-time mom.
As a teacher I have the most problems with parents who are away from home a lot but still anxious to prove to me and the kids that they are big advocates for them and the teacher is the obstacle to everyone being happy. This is not good parenting in my books either. Yes I admit that full-time mothers have a huge adjustment to make as their income goes down and the teens get hard to handle because their ego gets a little meshed up in ‘DId I choose right after all?” But that is not a problem with mothers and options but about stigma and social policy. Right now we not only praise mothers who still earn but we call them the ‘working ‘mothers as if care of a child that childcare employees do for a living is suddenly not work if done at home. We have skewed the finances and tax policy of most nations to favor women who earn and of course then the hardship of mothers at home is intense because in the end the only thing they gave their kids was their presence- not great housing, not great holidays or great clothes. Mothers who earn outside the home deal with guilt and perceive they are being condemned as bad mothers but actually government loves them and social policy loves them and most mothers at home are jealous of their clothes and social status and income. I think we have to get past this idea of who has it worst though because men can laugh and just discount us all when we can’t even agree among ourselves what is fair law about mothering. i would strongly suggest the in-fighting and martyrdom stops, from both sides, and we ask men who run government since it is mostly men who still do, that they start to recognize our dilemmas, and value our care roles and our paid work roles however we balance them. We’re far far from that right now. Look at the article itself and its use of the term ‘work’. The writer is not even recognizing unpaid care as work.
[...] Is it Dina Lohan's fault that her daughter is so messed up? [...]
Yes, some, though not all, of Lindsay Lohan’s bad behavior can be traced back to her mother. Dina Lohan is clearly an enabler. Both she and her husband treat Lindsay like a meal ticket first and their child second.
The generalization itself makes the question a rather foolish one to ask. The true question should be, ‘Do mothers who are so caught up in their own need for fame and who constantly turn a blind eye to their daughter’s issues and lack of responsibility raise irresponsible children?’
Had the question been worded like that, I would say most definitely. But a full-time mother does not mean they’re going to end up with a messed up child. Lindsay Lohan has never had to take responsibility for anything she’s every done. It’s always been someone else driving, someone else’s pants, someone gave her the wrong time and made her late… And right there next to her is her mother, nodding with her vacant eyes, agreeing with everything that her daughter/meal-ticket is saying.
Dina Lohan needs to have her own jail cell, but we don’t lock up mother’s for screwing up their children. It’s too bad though. She still has two children that she can mess up and there needs to be an intervention.
Totally agree with the helicopter parents statement… My housemate was raised by his working mum, but in his FIFTH year of University -and after living on his own for 5 years, one of them in the US (we’re Spanish)-, I had to teach him how to wash up, how to wash the floor, how to wash his clothes or how to clean surfaces. I also had to explain him why during the winter it’s better if you put on a hoodie when you’re cold than turning on the heat until it’s hot enough in the room for you to wear just a t-shirt. He has always been spoilt rotten and can’t do fuck all. We were seriously sick of his behaviour in the house (as much as we love him) simply because he had never been taught to do anything (in his literal words: “it doesn’t matter… Mum’s paying!!”).