A few weeks ago, when Melanie Thernstrom wrote here about the lengths to which she and her husband went to conceive her two children, many of you used the comments to say something along the lines of “why go through all that to have children, only to leave them with a babysitter and not raise them yourself.”
Just last week, when we discussed Amy Chua’s very time-intensive parenting philosophy here, the comments included more than a few questions about how on earth she was doing right by her employer (in her case, Yale Law School) if she was pouring that many hours into monitoring her children’s piano practice.
But, just a short while earlier, when I wrote about Erica Jong’s belief that women were imprisoned by motherhood and should free themselves by focusing on the professional parts of themselves, there was much shouting in the comments about how being a parent trumped all.
Then, on Friday, I wrote about Dawn Meehan, who had left the work force to raise her six children — establishing a part-time writing business on the side — and found herself frantic to find health insurance and additional income now that her ex-husband had been fired from his job. Many commenters were none too sympathetic that she had spent all those years not earning a “real” paycheck.
Stay home with your kids. Stay in the work force. Don’t define yourself by your children. Don’t define yourself by your job. (I’m pretty sure there was even one commenter who declared that Melanie should never have left her children with a nanny and then wondered why Dawn allowed herself to become dependent on her husband.)
All this noise sounds like the exchange of strong opinions, but I would argue it is really a measure of ambivalence. We are so invested in our own choices as parents, and simultaneously so insecure that we have made the wrong ones, that we lash out in defense when someone else makes a different choice. This does not mean that some choices aren’t actually wrong — in my opinion, Amy Chua has crossed the line, though NOT because she is neglecting her job — but most are more complicated than our “shoot from the hip even if it means contradicting ourselves” responses here would suggest.
Amber Hinds was particularly troubled by the attacks on Dawn Meehan last week. Hinds is a 25-year-old mother of one, who left her job as a college recruiter in New York when her daughter was born and moved to Nantucket, Mass., where she became a lactation counselor and stay-at-home mother. In other words, she finds echoes of her own life choices in Dawn’s. She asked to write a guest post exploring what happened here last week in the responses to Dawn’s story, and to try to rephrase the argument or, at least, tamp down some of the anger.
I am more than happy to give her the floor. Whether there is any way to have a calm conversation about this subject is now up to all of you.
STAY-AT-HOME PARENTING AFTER DIVORCE
By Amber Hinds
It’s not unusual to get a mix of comments on any well-read blog post. I can’t think of many topics that would elicit complete consensus from an audience as broad as New York Times readers; yet when Lisa Belkin wrote last week about Dawn Meehan’s struggles to make ends meet after the loss of child support and insurance for her six kids (when Dawn’s ex-husband was fired), I was surprised by the number of negative comments directed at Dawn and her activities since the divorce. Several comments demanded to know why Dawn hadn’t got a job in the past year, one, Ras, went so far as to call Dawn’s actions “SAHM mommy blogger suicide,” saying
“I can’t help but wonder why a person w/ 6 kids whose husband left her then spent another year just blogging (i.e. no income, fully dependent on a man who should not be trusted). That is, time and energy was spent writing about her trials for all to read, with no income being generated, and all the while apparently no action plan materialized for employment of any kind to acquire an income, insurance, or just work experience.”
Lisa, it seems, anticipated this response; she quickly pointed out (before anyone had a chance to comment) that “if anyone is wondering why Dawn went ahead and had six children and then expected other people to take care of her, my thinking is that she didn’t expect people to.” I, on the other hand, did not anticipate such a response and was taken aback by Lisa’s defensive end note – because I have a hard time understanding why it might be wrong for Dawn to have expected that her ex-husband would continue to support her staying home with their children.
I realize, at first glance, that makes me sound like a lazy stay-at-home mom who wants to live a life of luxury, feasting on the fruits of someone else’s labor. When I mentioned this notion to my husband, he gave me a wary look and then jokingly said that would mean the ex-husband would have all the negatives of having a wife without any of the positives. But, upon deeper discussion, he agreed that if it was financially feasible for one income to support two households, divorce shouldn’t necessitate a change in child-rearing practice. Because that’s what this is really about. This isn’t about the ex-wife wanting to get out of work while the ex-husband has to do it all. This isn’t about a woman choosing to have more kids than she might or might not be able to care for on her own. This isn’t about a failure to be self-sufficient or about a working spouse quitting her job to live off of child and spousal support. This is about a couple who (presumably) mutually agreed that the best way to rear their children was with one stay-at-home parent, and then that couple got divorced. What about divorce should change their belief that the best thing for their kids is to have a stay-at-home parent? If the marriage agreement is that the mother will stay home with the children while the father provides the family’s income (or vice versa) why would divorce change that?
Most people would agree that divorce can and often does have a negative impact on children. Multiple studies have shown that children from divorced families experience, on average, lower academic achievement, more behavioral problems, poorer psychological adjustment, more negative self-concepts, more social difficulties and more problematic relationships with both mothers and fathers. So doesn’t it stand that when a divorce does occur, we want to make the change as easy as possible on the kids? Shouldn’t the parents do everything in their power to maintain, as closely as possible, the child’s normal routine? Wouldn’t it be potentially traumatic to put them in daycare all day when they are used to being with a parent, at the same time that other numerous and significant life changes are taking place? I can’t imagine how troublesome the loss of time spent with their mother could be to the Meehan kids who, by Dawn’s account, were already suffering the complete loss of their father; if anything, they need her home with them now more than they did when they had a father participating in their lives.
In divorce, many people have a hard time separating their issues with the ex-spouse from the children. In Terry Arendell’s interviews with divorced fathers, child support was often seen as “a continuation of support for the undeserving former spouse. Of 57 fathers (three-quarters of the sample) who were paying child support consistently or fairly regularly, almost two-thirds were adamant in their assertions that men’s rights are infringed upon by the child support system.”
Rejecting the idea that someone who has previously relied upon his or her spouse for financial support while caring for their children should continue to do so after divorce stems from a failure to see that continued financial reliance is really about the children. By continuing to provide for Dawn staying home, her husband was providing for what he and his wife had previously defined as his children’s best interest. To say that Dawn should have been doing something different with her time completely ignores that agreement about how their children would be raised – and that’s to say nothing of how such comments contribute to the devaluing of women’s work.
I don’t disagree that a stay-at-home parent should be prepared for a situation in which that lifestyle is no longer feasible, such as the death of the breadwinner or the loss of a job, but I don’t believe that divorce is one of those situations. Not when divorce often increases the standard of living for men by 10 percent and decreases it for women by 27 percent (Peterson 1996) and not when Dawn’s ex-husband was, presumably, financially able to do so until the loss of his job. What I really wonder, though, is would people be saying the same thing if it was the ex-husband at home taking care of the kids while Dawn worked and paid child support? Or would they be applauding him for sacrificing career while putting his kids needs first?