Category: Parenting

More Mom Breadwinners Challenge Our Notions of the Traditional Family

It’s not easy to diffuse the impact of long-held stereotypes, especially when biology is involved.

It looks like my situation  — I’m a working mom and my husband is a “diapering dad“ — is becoming more common. And according to the Pew Center’s recent numbers, the radical change in society in the past 50 years looks like this — women are now the sole or primary breadwinners in four out of ten households — up from 11% in 1960. The study also found that family income is actually higher when the mother is the breadwinner.

A change like this one does not come easily — it alters people’s fundamental notions of family structure, and may not be a perfect fit with the human biological reality. I’d argue a mom can make the money and have thriving kids and a thriving marriage — uterus, breasts, estrogen and all — as long as we don’t pretend those biological differences don’t exist.

The Pew report came out a few days after the release of hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones‘ statements to a group of business school students about the unsuitability of mothers as global macro traders, an intense profession. He said, “As soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it” and motioned to his chest, arguing that becoming a mother made women lose focus. His remarks were immediately criticized, especially by those of us who think we were focused pretty well after having babies. Continue reading More Mom Breadwinners Challenge Our Notions of the Traditional Family

How I Do It

[Note: The following is my contribution to the “How I Do It” series at the New York Times’ Motherlode.  I thought the series provided a unique way to really see parenthood in action – there is no better way to answer the question “How do you do it?” than really laying it out, warts and all!]
 
Motherlode asked parents, from members of Congress to retail clerks, to share “how they do it” on one typical day.

Rebecca Hughes Parker is the editor in chief of The FCPA Report, a legal publication about anticorruption issues. Previously, she spent eight years as a litigator at a large law firm, a job she took while pregnant with her twin girls. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and three daughters, 8-year-old twins and a 2-year-old. Her husband is the primary caregiver for the children. They have never had a nanny or a housekeeper.

Manhattan, Tuesday, May 14
5:20 a.m. My husband comes in from the truncated overnight shift he did at the local television station –  he freelances as a news writer for the morning show there and does a shift once every two weeks or so. Today he worked midnight to 5 a.m. He takes the dog out.

5:40 I peel myself off the bed and go into the room that my three girls — 8-year-old twins and a 2-year-old — share. I nudge Alex, one of the twins. “Are you sure you want to go?” I say, hoping she will say she wants to cancel ice skating and we can go back to bed. “I want to go,” she says. I tiptoe out of the room, thankful that for once the 2-year-old, Charlotte, does not wake up. The other twin, Natalie, sleeps like a log. Continue reading How I Do It

The Unsteady Rise of the Power Mom and the Diapering Dad

“The most important career choice you’ll make is who you’ll marry,” Sheryl Sandberg, the ubiquitous Facebook COO and author of the “Lean In” book (and social movement), famously tells women.  She advocates marrying someone who will do 50% of the “second shift,” freeing women to go full force in their careers, and allowing those stubborn low numbers of women in leadership positions to finally rise.

IF A MAN DOES ALL THE WORK THAT A WOMAN TRADITIONALLY DOES, as my stay-at-home husband happily does, IS THE PROBLEM SOLVED?  Did I manage to reverse the gender roles and be the “father” who goes to work?  Fresh out of law school, I expected to.  But, it wasn’t so straightforward. Continue reading The Unsteady Rise of the Power Mom and the Diapering Dad

Six Tips for Pumping Breastmilk at Work

You have breastfed your baby (or twins) since birth, and now you have to go back to work.  It takes dedication to continue nursing when you are away from your little ones –  obviously, a mother’s breasts were designed to feed her babies directly from the source and.   But, thanks to technology, increased awareness and breastfeeding-friendly laws, there are some ways to make it a little easier (not easy!).  The following are are some tips from those who have been there. Continue reading Six Tips for Pumping Breastmilk at Work

Santa Issues

Santa Claus has an expiration date. Every parent who has introduced Santa Claus to their kids knows this. You get a few good years and then the doubts start creeping in. Other kids at school are usually the catalysts in this process, which seeps through school lunchrooms with the first signs of frost every year. Usually it’s the hand-me-down scoffings of older siblings. Sometimes, however, it’s an axiom discovered through a child’s deduction alone. Continue reading Santa Issues

When Maternity Leave Hits Home

My daughter dragged my lofty Feminist principles down to earth.

The cold slap of reality came with a note from her 2nd grade teacher. Just over a month into the school year she was announcing that she’s pregnant and will be going on leave around her due date in February. Presumably, she’ll be out until May.

Now, my first reaction was a very human one. Good for her — there certainly was nothing as rewarding in my life as being a mother. And who does not love newborns?

My second reaction was equally — but less proudly — human. My daughter will have to adjust to a new teacher midway through the year.

This is a girl who’s already pretty shy. She’s very bright and genuinely wants to follow rules and be a good kid. That tendency to follow rules and do what’s expected leads her to identify strongly with the authority figures in front of her. To suddenly displace this figure and swap in a stranger for three months would be a pretty violent blow to her sense of world order.

The timing isn’t ideal either. Second grade is where the educational rubber begins to hit the road. Math commands a significantly greater share of classroom time than previous years. Reading skills are assumed and developed. The unofficial but unavoidable labeling known as Tracking, by teachers, fellow students and self-creating individuals alike, begins to form. And, lest we forget, the very official and equally unavoidable standardized tests begin at this stage to lock students into the academic trajectories that will propel them through the rest of their lives. These are not stakes to be trifled with.

Maternity leave, however, is sacrosanct. My own was crucial. When this same daughter and her twin sister were born ten weeks premature, my leave at the time allowed me to spend eight weeks at her side in the hospital NICU and then another two months bonding at home.

After giving birth to her younger sister February of this year, I took full advantage of my law firm’s three months full pay and one half pay, and tacked on another, painfully unpaid, month. That leave gave me the chance to exclusively breast feed my new baby, a relationship I have been able to continue while working because of our strong start. Breastfeeding was something my first daughter was too underdeveloped at birth to ever really get the hang of.

Women need this time. Infants do too. I look with envy at some of the countries that realize this while we in the U.S. lag. In Sweden parents split 480 days of paid leave at 80% salary between birth and the child’s eighth birthday. Our Nordic friends manage this while reaching a 5.5% GDP Growth rate in 2010, nearly doubling the 2.9% registered by the U.S. in the same year. Their economy is a fraction the size of ours, but clearly, valuing family during that period of a child’s development isn’t devastating their bottom line.

The United States is, after all, one of only three nations in the developed world with policies that exclude paid maternity leave. (We are in the company of Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.) My daughter’s teacher’s leave will be unpaid.

So after reading the note I asked my daughter, “Are you excited that your teacher is having a baby?”
The gloom settled immediately onto my little girl’s face. She looked away, mumbling that she didn’t want to talk about it. Further pressing went nowhere. Appeals to her 6 year old commitment to forward leaning public policy, I feared, would be fruitless.

How can I tell her that it’s good that her teacher will be gone for three months? How can I tell myself it won’t make a difference at all to her education? Can anyone truly reconcile the human cost of political ideals?

This is where I have to begin: in all likelihood, everything will be fine. Beginning one day this winter the kids in my daughter’s class will have to learn math from someone else for a while. Maybe the kids can all write letters to the new baby and do art projects and this can be a thread that pulls together the many chunks of learning that might otherwise fall away. Maybe. But even if it’s not, it’s still the right thing. Call it Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand or the Golden Rule, I want the same right to those critical first few months after childbirth and so I will defend that right for others. The benefit is worth the cost.

My daughter may have to study harder this winter to make up for the disruption to her classroom routine. That’s not a bad thing. The broader lesson is better yet. I don’t want her to suffer in any way. But I’d be happy if, by getting pulled between grounded reality and high ideals, she managed to grow.

Posted in the Huffington Post