Kids Are an Equal Employment Opportunity

Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked
into the design of every life, meeting an individual
need as well as a pervasive need in society.

MARY CATHERINE BATESON, COMPOSING ALIFE

Both of my parents loved sports. My father would stand in front of our house and throw a football to my brothers and me as we ran pass patterns around the elm trees. My mother hit thousands of tennis balls over the net, trying in vain to make worthy opponents of us. Each of them spent summer weekends hitting fly balls for us to field, teaching us to dive, and trying to interest us in golf. (At least they succeeded with my brothers on that one.) My father was focused on our excelling and winning, while my mother wanted us to have fun and get exercise.

Both my parents also cooked. My mother prepared by far the bulk of our daily meals, but most Saturday nights my father made up his special hamburgers. He also had a knack for soups and grilling. My brothers and I did not think it odd that our mother could hit a fastball or that our father could cook. Even within their apparently traditional marriage, we saw each doing things that didn’t fit the stereotypes.

More than twenty years ago, when I was working for the Carnegie Council on Children, I heard the trailblazing social philosophers Erik Erikson and Erich Fromm discuss the different roles mothers and fathers traditionally played in bringing up children. From listening to them, I concluded that the conventional parental roles could be summed up by saying that men typically acted as breadwinners and rulemakers, while women were homemakers and caregivers.

What struck me even then was that there are many variations on the traditional parental division of labor that have worked over time and are working today. But it remains true that raising children, like most important work in our society, requires a constellation of skills and perspectives. Children deserve the benefit of what society has traditionally considered to be male and female traits and skills to meet their physical, emotional, and intellectual needs, and to offer them models for a range of human behaviors.

Even in the best of circumstances, it is difficult for any one of us to raise children alone. And when single parents try, they have to perform roles outside their usual repertoire, or get others to take on those roles. Even families with two parents rely on the village for functions that are beyond their scope.

Yet as obvious as it is that children’s needs exceed what any individual or pair of individuals can provide, society continues to characterize child rearing as “women’s work.” Even when women with children share the breadwinner and rulemaker roles with their husbands, they almost always bear the primary—and disproportionate—responsibility for caregiving and homemaking. One of the greatest gifts we can give our children is the awareness that these roles can and should be shared more fairly and flexibly. In the meantime, stereotypes about women’s roles persist.

A recent study done by a University of Michigan psychologist purports to show that young women are exhibiting more “masculine” behavior because they are becoming more assertive, ambitious, and self-confident, while young men are not exhibiting more “feminine” behavior like expressing empathy and caring. Why not consider all these to be human behaviors that both men and women display, depending on their particular temperaments and circumstances?

Is a mother who is assertive or ambitious on behalf of her children or husband acting “feminine,” while a mother who is ambitious and assertive on behalf of her own career or a public issue she cares about acting “masculine”? Is a father who rocks a crying baby or soothes a teenager’s hurt feelings “feminine,” while a father who refuses to comfort either child “masculine”? Sometimes we fall into the trap of sexual stereotyping as we grapple with new ways of articulating our changing experiences and responsibilities.

We like to think we’ve come a long way from the limited range of roles that were considered “proper” for each gender in the past. Most of the women my mother knew stayed home because society expected them to, and they aligned their own expectations with society’s, even if they wished they had different choices.

Some of us can recall an aunt who longed to go to college, a grandmother who kept voluminous journals she showed to no one, a female cousin with a head for figures. Much of the fiction written by and about women over the centuries contains an undercurrent of disappointment, dissatisfaction, or simple wistfulness about roads not taken. Part of the reason girls of every generation who read Little Women identify with Jo March is that they see her as unafraid to take action on her own behalf, to turn away from a predictable path and chart her own course.

In fact, many women defied convention in the past, by choice or necessity. All through our nation’s history, women have worked outside the home as well as in it. Even during the 1950s, plenty of women with and without children were working in factories, offices, schools, and other people’s homes. But because these women’s lives did not match the conventional image, their work remained largely invisible. Often the official portrait of American life has omitted the diversity of women’s experience as well as their needs and desires.

 

WHEN I look back on my childhood, I see how my mother and my girlfriends’ mothers worked to push open doors of opportunity for us. They supported our academic and athletic pursuits and ferried us to and from lessons and practices. They held us to high standards, even if they spoke of their aspirations for us mostly in terms of their wanting us to do well enough in school so that we could go to college or get training for a job that could provide a good living if we had to support ourselves.

Perhaps because my mother’s background dimmed her own prospects for higher education, she was more outspoken in her support of me. From the very beginning she believed that her greatest responsibility to me was getting me prepared to make the choices that were right for my life, even if they weren’t the ones she would have—or could have—made. She shared my dismay when, at fourteen, I wrote to NASA asking how I might become an astronaut, only to be told that women were not being considered for the job (a policy I was delighted to see changed eventually).

It wasn’t that the mothers I knew growing up did not want to be full-time homemakers and caregivers. Their dedication and discipline reflected how important they considered those roles to be. But they had the wisdom to know that the years devoted to childrearing come to an end, and that divorce or the death of a spouse can leave women on their own, with decades of productive life ahead. And they saw—as their daughters came to see more clearly—that the larger society gave more lip service than real respect or reward to their efforts to nurture families and communities. Because of them, the women’s movement, and increasing economic pressures, more and more women began to take up paid work that the marketplace valued: “men’s work.”

As with any major societal shift, there have been trade-offs and unanticipated consequences for both women and men. The struggle to give work and family the time and attention they need can be emotionally as well as physically exhausting. By and large, however, as columnist Ellen Goodman observes, “Women still see their lives as better than their mothers’. This is the generation that has traded depression for stress—not a wholly bad bargain. They have more options and more power as well as more obligations.”

Goodman’s observation is supported by the findings of a 1994 survey of more than 250,000 working women of every income level, job category, and family status, conducted by the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor. Their responses, which Vice President Gore and I presented and discussed in a public forum, are detailed in a report, “Working Women Count!” For working women with children at home, the number one issue was the struggle to integrate work and family and to find and pay for decent child care. A working mother from Milwaukee spoke for thousands of women when she wrote: “Between balancing home and work and job, you always feel like you are doing four things at one time. You’re doing your job but you’re thinking about what you are going to cook for supper and who is going to pick up the kids.” The women’s descriptions of their lives are peppered with words like “hectic,” “tough,” “hard,” and “rough.” Many women said they were tired all the time.

Mothers working outside the home believe their employers could be more understanding about children’s illnesses and doctor’s appointments. They say they need expanded leave policies to care for children or ailing relatives, but many note that they cannot afford to sacrifice pay for long or at all. In general, women in lower-paid jobs found their workplaces less family-friendly and flexible than women in executive and management positions.

Before I had Chelsea, I noticed that in all the offices where I worked, most of the female workers began whispering into their phones every afternoon at around three o’clock. Finally, it dawned on me that they were making sure their children arrived home from school safely and were doing their homework or whatever else they were supposed to be doing. They whispered because they felt they might be penalized for carrying out their family obligations.

Underlying all the survey responses was a familiar refrain: women believe that their work contributions and responsibilities are undervalued, including their responsibilities to children. They know how hard they work for their families, and they believe that other sectors of society, including their employers, should do more to help. Their concern for the well-being of children fuels their opinions on broader issues and their desire to be heard. As the report notes, “They care deeply about their jobs, their co-workers, their workplaces, and the state of the national economy.”

Although the personal demands on women are heavy, they take pride in their contribution to the family’s income, and eight out of ten respondents say they “love” or “like” their jobs. But they are not stereotypes—neither “upbeat super-moms that unequivocally love their jobs and never have a problem or a hair out of place” nor the equally stereotypical “angst-ridden women so torn apart by competing demands that they return to the home” or “driven career women who give up their personal lives to ‘make it’ in the world of men.” They are responsible adults with real lives and real needs, including the need to contribute according to their talents and abilities and to be granted the assistance that will enable them to do a good job at work and at home.

The survey responses are a reminder that we still haven’t broken the mold—or, more accurately, broken the mold that makes the molds, the mechanism that insists on forcing complicated needs and desires into neat little boxes. Are we “career women” or “stay-at-home moms,” “traditionalists” or “new traditionalists”?

The attempt to attach labels to our lives takes us backward. Whenever we pose women’s options as an “either/ or” choice—most commonly between work and family—we do a disservice all around. In earlier generations, we lost artists, doctors, and engineers. My generation lost good mothers and dedicated community volunteers among women who did not see a way to combine their work life with making a home or nurturing a family. We are fond of saying that women “juggle” work, marriage, children, and myriad other obligations. I used the phrase too, until author and scholar Mary Catherine Bateson pointed out that when you juggle, eventually something gets dropped.

Now I prefer the metaphor of composing that Bateson illuminates in Composing a Life—making something beautiful, like a patchwork quilt, of the elements we choose. Perhaps it would be easier if the stuff of our lives were cut from a uniform social and familial pattern, even if the cloth is not the pattern we would have designed for ourselves. Easier maybe, but not so beautiful or well suited to our particular needs, desires, and circumstances.

 

THE FOOLISHNESS of stereotyping was brought home to me when I was a young lawyer but not yet a mother. I was asked by a client, an insurance company, to attend on its behalf a juvenile court hearing at which two brothers, ages ten and twelve, were to appear because they were accused of vandalizing a neighbor’s house.

I will never forget the mother of the boys as she testified on their behalf. Fierce as a lioness defending her cubs, she denied—in the face of overwhelming evidence—that her sons were the vandals. They couldn’t be, she explained, because she had quit work and stayed home to raise them. (That was the first time I really understood the meaning of the saying “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt”!)

Pitting stay-at-home moms against work-outside-of-the-home moms makes everyone a loser. There is no magic formula for raising children. You will find successes and failures among parents who do the work of staying home with their kids and among those who leave home to go to work. What makes the difference is whether parents have the competence and commitment to give children what they need for healthy development.

It is time for us to make our peace with the past. We can begin by taking care not to denigrate the roles of women as mothers and homemakers and by not jumping to conclusions about the mothering skills of women who work outside the home. I suggest that, in private and in public, we stop paying lip service to motherhood and start giving parents—men as well as women—the physical, financial, and emotional support they need to raise children well.

As I said in my speech at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, “We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. That is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential.”

 

I HAVE had my own experiences with the power of stereotypes, most notably when the response I gave to a reporter’s question during the 1992 Presidential campaign led to the infamous cookies-and-tea tempest. I had understood the question to refer to the ceremonial role of a public official’s spouse, and I replied that I had chosen to pursue my law practice while my husband was governor rather than stay home as an official hostess, serving cookies and tea to guests.

Now, the fact is, I’ve made my share of cookies and served hundreds of cups of tea. But I never thought that my cookie-baking or tea-serving abilities made me a good, bad, or indifferent mother, or a good or bad person. So it never occurred to me that my comment would be taken as insulting mothers (I guess including my own!) who choose to stay home with their children full time. Nor did it occur to me that the next day’s headlines would reduce me to an anti-cookie—and therefore obviously anti-family—“career woman.” Many people jumped to conclusions about me, both positive and negative, based as much on how they interpreted what I said as on the words themselves. Few heard my full comments or knew much about me before labeling me in one way or another.

I learned important lessons from the whole episode, one of which is that when I am asked a question that relates to me personally, I have to be aware that my answer may be measured by how people feel about the choices they’ve made in their own lives. But the incident also highlighted for me the amount of energy that is wasted on public and private sniping over women’s and men’s choices and on stereotyping their values, abilities, and predilections. Whatever our differences of opinion on these matters, they pale beside the needs of children, which demand all our varied resources.

Raising children isn’t like other jobs, for men or women. There is no exam to pass, no license to hang on the wall. There aren’t any vacations, sabbaticals, or leaves of absence, either. You may be a “full-time” lawyer or secretary or teacher or construction worker, but you’re a parent around the clock. In addition to being breadwinners, many women are frequently primary caregivers not only for children but for aging parents, shouldering a punishing triple load.

It may be that women will achieve economic and social parity with men only when mothers and fathers fully share responsibility for rearing their children and other household tasks. That day, however, is not likely to dawn anytime soon. In the meantime, we can do two things that will make a difference over time: give both mothers and fathers the time and encouragement to become actively involved in the process of parenting; and help our sons and daughters to avoid the limitations imposed by stereotyping.

 

WHEN I became pregnant in 1979, my law firm did not have a maternity leave policy. When I tried to raise the subject, I encountered embarrassed silence. As the months went on, I noticed that my male colleagues averted their eyes from my swelling body. When I went to court, judges asked with more concern than usual if anyone needed a recess.

I wound up with a four-month maternity leave that enabled me to spend much-needed time with Chelsea, getting accustomed to my new role as a mother. But most new parents don’t meet with anything like this kind of accommodation.

As I have mentioned, the Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees unpaid leave to employees in firms with more than fifty workers. That is a good beginning. Many parents, however, cannot afford to forgo pay for even a few weeks, and very few employers in America offer paid maternity and paternity leave. (Some notable exceptions are outdoor-wear manufacturer Patagonia, ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s, Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, the Sara Lee Corporation, and NationsBank.) Only about half of all female workers of childbearing age are eligible for short-term disability benefits that would cover pregnancy and childbirth, because the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, while it prohibits discrimination against these conditions, does not mandate coverage where none already exists.

Other countries have figured out that honoring the family by giving it adequate time for caregiving is not only right for the family and smart for society but good for employers, who reap the benefits of workers’ increased loyalty and peace of mind. The Germans, for example, guarantee working mothers fourteen weeks’ maternity leave (six weeks before and eight weeks after delivery) at full salary. Mothers are also guaranteed job-protected leave for up to three years after childbirth, for the first two years of which they receive a maternity grant equal to about one fifth of the average German woman’s salary. While this financial benefit is not adequate to support most families, it is a helpful supplement to family income.

Other European countries provide similarly generous leave, some of them to fathers as well as mothers. In Sweden, for example, couples receive fifteen months of job-guaranteed, paid leave to share between them. The pay is approximately 90 percent of salary for the first twelve months and is reduced further in the last three months.

Yet few Swedish fathers take advantage of the policy. According to a University of Wisconsin study, attitudes and beliefs play a significant role in the decision, along with practical considerations. Many Swedish men, like their American counterparts, believe that men should be the primary breadwinners, lack exposure to male role models who care for infants, and, not least, perceive that there is little social acceptance and encouragement for taking paternal leave.

In our country, even when paid paternity leave is offered, few men take it. One exception to this pattern is Lotus Development Corporation, which offers four weeks of paid leave to new fathers and adoptive parents. Of the 305 Lotus employees who took family leave in 1994, more than a third were men, “an unusually high percentage in American business,” according to Working Mother magazine, which adds that Lotus’s “cutting edge culture…makes men feel safe taking time away from work to care for their children.”

Many employers are not supportive even when leave laws apply. Kevin Knussman, a Maryland state trooper for nearly two decades, applied for extended parental leave to care for his new baby while his wife recuperated from a difficult pregnancy. The state police personnel office informed him that unless his wife was “in a coma or dead,” he didn’t qualify as a “primary care provider.” He was ordered back to work after ten days leave. Earlier this year, Knussman filed a lawsuit against the state of Maryland, claiming that the police department’s refusal was a violation of the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Despite institutional resistance, more fathers are beginning to put time with their families high on the list when they make job decisions. A recent survey of more than six thousand employees in professional and manufacturing jobs found almost as many men as women reporting that they made adjustments in their work lives such as refusing promotion offers, transfers, extensive travel, or overtime. Business may be starting to hear and to respond. Another study showed that working men and women who ranked family over work earned more in the long run than those who did not.

As the saying goes, no one on his deathbed ever says he wishes he’d spent more time at the office. Many divorced men who form second families vow they won’t neglect their children the second time around. But children from a first marriage aren’t training wheels, and they don’t get a second chance at childhood.

More men are beginning to acknowledge the tough choices parenthood sometimes entails. My husband’s former deputy domestic policy adviser, Bill Galston, decided that he couldn’t combine his work at the White House with the time he wanted to spend with his son. Galston spearheaded the administration’s efforts to strengthen families and support children, and he takes seriously his obligations to his own child. He says, “Fatherhood for me has been the most deeply transformative experience in my life. Nothing else is a close second. It is a prism through which I see the world.” He tried hard to integrate time with his son into the demands of his work, bringing him to the White House after school to do homework or to dine with him. But when his son wrote him a letter in which he said, “Baseball’s not fun when there’s no one there to applaud you,” Galston decided to leave a job he loved to return to teaching. He told my husband, “You can replace me, but my son can’t.”

Most men, however, are unlikely to participate wholeheartedly in the care of their children until they are not only accepted as but expected to become active caregivers by the culture at large. Gender roles change slowly, and more than legislative change or progressive business policies is required. It is an age-old problem, and not a uniquely American one by any means.

In a poor section of Santiago, Chile, I visited La Pintana Community Center, which offers a variety of programs to strengthen and preserve families. Two working-class couples spoke to me of their experiences in a program designed to strengthen fathers’ involvement with their wives and children. The men told me how they used to spend their nonworking hours having a good time with their friends, leaving their wives home to care for the children. The counseling program, however, had helped them to discover how rewarding time spent with their families could be.

If a Latin American culture that has strong notions about gender roles is attempting to find ways to promote the idea that fatherhood is as challenging and rewarding as anything in the so-called real world, so can we. Perhaps the most effective way we can involve men in parenting is simply to do so.

I remember how tentative my father was about even holding my baby brothers at first. In contrast, my brother Tony is an active caretaker for his son, and my husband was an eager participant in caring for Chelsea. He held her and sang and talked to her for hours. He had never tended a baby before, though, and I had to back off to create enough space for him to figure out how to get comfortable with her. I forced myself to stop hovering over them and to let him learn for himself how to tell a “wet” cry from a “hungry” one, or how to change a diaper without fear.

I also had to accept that he wouldn’t always tend to Chelsea the same way I did. When Chelsea was learning how to turn over, Bill had her on our bed one day, watching with amazement as she turned first one way, then the other. He called excitedly to me to come see and, when I arrived, told me in all seriousness that he was sure she understood gravity. A few minutes later, she rolled off the bed and fell onto the carpet. So much for her grasp of physics!

A father who cares for his own child needs to be appreciated as a responsible parent rather than relegated to the role of “baby-sitter” or ill-trained assistant. Inexperience may result in occasional mishaps—an unsecured diaper that falls down or some other minor inconvenience. My friends and I often shake our heads over what our husbands will let kids do when we’re not around. Bedtimes get pushed back, and meals become junk food extravaganzas. But the time children spend with their fathers builds a special bond that is more enduring than the occasional cranky, sleepy, stomachachy aftermath.

No one can dictate exactly how a given household should divide labor. It depends on the unique needs and abilities of each member and what seems right for the family as a whole. Two of my dearest friends illustrate two of the different ways it can be done.

One, a friend since grade school, quit teaching school when the first of her three children was born. For many years, she led a life much like my mother’s, devoting herself full time to her children and her home. Now that her youngest child is in junior high, she has again taken a paying job. Her husband has been the family’s consistent breadwinner, but he has also participated daily in the care of their children. In addition to sharing household chores, he has done, in his words, “dad things” like coaching their sports teams.

My other friend married after she was forty and had a child when she was forty-five. Her husband, who has a job that enables him to work from home, has assumed the bulk of the cooking and the daily care of their son, while she has continued a hectic professional career that includes frequent travel. The two of them are at ease with this division of labor, and their son is thriving. They remind me of what Shirley Abrahamson, a distinguished judge, said when she accepted an award from the American Bar Association. In thanking her husband for his support, she noted that he had managed to combine marriage and career—but that no one ever asked him how he does it!

 

CHILDREN LEARN what they see. When they see their fathers cooking dinner or changing the baby’s diaper, they’ll grow up knowing that caregiving is a human trait, rather than a female one. When they see their mothers changing tires or changing fuses, they’ll accept troubleshooting as a human quality, rather than a male one. We should be mindful of the messages we send them as well as the behavior we demonstrate.

Differences in adults’ treatment of girls and boys begin well before they reach their first birthdays, as has been demonstrated by studies in which infants in diapers or snowsuits are left in the care of adults who think they know the child’s sex because of the names they are told. The same baby is treated differently depending on whether the adult thinks it is a boy or a girl. For example, an adult might identify and respond to the same infant’s cry as anger in a “boy” and fear in a “girl.”

These early signals continue in school. When a girl does poorly on an exam, adults are inclined to say things like, “Never mind, you did the best you can.” Boys are more likely to be told, “Try harder. You can do better.” The message that children hear—and internalize—is that effort pays off for boys more than for girls. They also learn that being a boy means taking risks, being active, and trying to do things on your own, while being a girl means needing adult assistance to do whatever you have trouble doing.

Stereotypes start to have an impact during the preschool years, when children tend to notice behavioral and other differences between boys and girls for the first time, and to be concerned with trying to define sex roles. Adults have the authority with children this age to do much to counter the messages they receive from the media and their peers. We can encourage girls to be active and dress them in comfortable, durable clothes that let them move freely. We can choose gifts that transcend gender stereotypes—building blocks for both girls and boys, for example. We can be equal opportunity chore-givers, enlisting girls in yard work and boys in housework.

We can also take care to talk to children in a way that counterbalances the stereotypes coming thick and fast from the media. We can make a point of asking girls about their activities rather than commenting just on their appearance, and we can encourage boys to describe their feelings. We can also acquaint them with the diverse opportunities that exist for women and men out in the world as well as at home. From the time Chelsea was small, Bill regularly took her with him to the governor’s office, where he kept a tiny desk stocked with paper and crayons so that she could do her “work” while he did his. We need to make the effort to give boys and girls alike a clear idea of what their parents and other adults do when they leave the house.

It’s important that we equip our children with solid, sensitive models of what men and women can be, both as caregivers and as achievers, because when they go out into the world, they’ll discover what men and women who try to put children first already know: the village has a long way to go to accommodate their diverse and changing roles both in the working world and at home.

Change starts with each of us. And despite the pressures and frustrations, the more time and energy mothers and fathers put into their parenting, the more joy they’ll get out of it. And the richer the models they’ll be providing for their children, now and as they begin to compose their own adult lives.