PAT HOLDEN writes:

Salon had an article in today’s edition about a stay-at-home mother who apparently regrets her decision to stay home.  I thought you might be interested and would be curious as to your response, if you are inclined to write one.

 I enjoy your website very much.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

Either this writer is deliberately misrepresenting her case, probably in the interest of selling a freelance piece, or she is extremely stupid. In any event, the editors clearly liked the attention-grabbing angle of a mother publicly regretting time spent with her children. They seem to have intentionally neglected to fill some holes.

Katy Read never mentions whether she was divorced involuntarily. If her husband divorced her without her consent, then he – and only he – is to blame for her economic problems and there are no larger implications to her situation, unless she were to venture into the issue of no-fault divorce and its evil consequences. If she divorced him willingly, then she is undeserving of any sympathy. She should be poor, and there’s nothing more to say. 

Mrs. Read says that all the children she knows who went through day care seem fine.  I know people who smoked cigarettes for many years who don’t have cancer but that doesn’t change the fact that smoking causes cancer. Studies show that daycare causes learning and behavior problems in children and disrupts the maternal bond. It is very easy for Mrs. Read to say now that her children would have been fine in day care. There is no risk in saying or thinking such a thing.  There is no chance of them ever being in day care at this point and the possibility is a mere abstraction to her.

Clearly, Mrs. Read’s maternal devotion is running dry. What happens to a woman’s conscience for her to publicly regret nurturing her childen? Something too dark to contemplate. It’s safe to say, this article will not make her sons feel loved when they come across it in future years.

Mrs. Read writes:

The economic crisis will erode women’s interest in “opting out” to care for children, heightening awareness that giving up financial independence — quitting work altogether or even, as I did, going part-time — leaves one frighteningly vulnerable.

If women had any sense, the economic crisis would inspire the opposite. They would drop out of the workforce if at all possible and leave the available jobs, or at least the best jobs, for men. There never were enough jobs for everyone, even before this economic downturn, contrary to the assumptions of modern feminism. And we won’t have a healthy economy in the future if women focus on short-term material gains. Women will be forced to work into their eighties because there will be not be an adequate workforce to support them. 

Articles and books that make mothering seem impractical, risky or unfulfilling always seem to be big sellers. For some reason, scare stories sell. Mrs. Read, in her eagerness to earn these few dollars, has gone out of her way to discourage and scare younger mothers. She had her time with her children, and it should have been the greatest experience of her life. No one, except possibly her ex-husband, owes her anything more.

Jesse Powell writes:

The article that Katy Read wrote puts a heavy emphasis on the financial security of the stay-at-home mother, implying that the stay-at-home mother has none, especially in these hard economic times, at least compared to the woman who maintains her career path while she is married and puts her kids in daycare. The whole dynamic that she is advocating, that women should work throughout their marriage, is rather sinister. The man withdraws the promise of long term support to his wife and in response the woman relies upon herself to provide for her own financial security and in so doing takes resources away from the child by putting the child into daycare, making the child more insecure and unprepared to meet the challenges of being an adult; and so the cycle repeats itself, except with each passing generation being even more incompetent and unprepared for adult responsibilities than their parents were. 

The specter of divorce plays heavily into the narrative of the vulnerable woman who has to “fend for herself” just in case “the worst happens”; it is as if the mere possibility of divorce at some time in the future casts a dark spell upon the woman forcing her to damage the marriage she is already in by continuing to work just so the dreaded divorce, if and when it comes, will be less damaging to her. 

Along these lines, I found an interesting response to Katy Read’s article in the comments section: 

Wednesday, January 5, 2011 10:25 PM ET 

Excellent article! 

Thank you! Don’t let the professional scolds get you down. There is a great deal of hard-won wisdom in this article. So sick of the sunshine-and-roses stories about staying home with the kids. Those stories NEVER bring up the inconvenient fact that close to half of all mothers will eventually be without support from their spouses (chiefly through divorce, but also through widowhood, illness, and disability). Where else do you find comparable risks being extolled? Is anyone writing enthusiastic lifestyle features about hobbies that have a 50% chance of death? Financial features on investments where 50% of investors lose all their money? Why are women told that embracing those odds is a beautiful thing to do; and why do so many listen? 

—hellocutie 

The hypothesis that the recession will lead to less stay-at-home mothers is an interesting one but the reality is that a marriage where the husband works while the wife stays at home is more financially secure precisely because when the family’s structural living expenses are geared towards the earnings of the husband alone if the husband then loses his job the wife can enter the labor force to make up for the temporary loss of income due to the husband losing his job; if both the husband and wife are already employed on a regular basis then the loss of either partner’s job creates a financial crisis with no easy solution since the other spouse is already working. 

Really, the issue of women working is more a moral issue than it is an economic issue; if a priority is placed on the well-being of the family and the well-being of the children then the wife will not work outside of the home for money simply because that is what is best for the family, for the children, for the success of the next generation. The important thing is to place a priority on the necessity of the stay-at-home mother; to reduce the family’s living expenses and maintain a high enough savings rate so that the mother can securely stay at home and not have financial pressures imposed upon her, the woman doing her part by keeping family expenses to a minimum.

Laura writes:

The comment Jesse cites from “hellocutie” fails to note that about two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women. Therefore the phantom of divorce and insolvency is largely a phoney one. The possibility of being involuntarily divorced and abandoned is real. There is no question about that. But if a woman has raised her children well, they will help her when they are grown if it should so happen that she is callously left by her husband. She can always scrape by and will find happiness knowing she has done her duties and upheld her vows. Anyway, there are far worse things than poverty. A state of self-absorption is worse than a state of economic hardship. By the way, I have yet to meet a divorced middle-class housewife who ended up living on the streets.

A reader writes:

Laura wrote, “Studies show that day care causes learning and behavior problems in children and disrupts the maternal bond.”

I’ve had the cognitive effects of day care on my to-research list and thought maybe now would be a good time to finally learn more. I would appreciate the sources referenced, or if you lost track of them, the general direction that I might find them.

Thank you.

Laura writes:

The research of Jay Belsky, released in 2001, showed the effects of institutional care on children. Belsky said at that time, “We find clearly, indisputably, and unambiguously that the more time children spend in day care, the more likely they are to be aggressive and disobedient.” He found that daycare was related to a number of developmental difficulties.

I recommend William and Wendy Dreskin’s book, The Day Care Decision, and Mary Eberstadt’s Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs and Other Parent Substitutes for a more thorough look at the research. Here is an excellent piece by Karl Zinsmeister, The Problem with Day Care.

One problem with day care studies is that they often look at an already highly dysfunctional population. If one compares the effects of day care on children for whom staying at home with a single teen mother is the alternative, day care is an obvious improvement. This must be taken into consideration when looking at studies,  as mentioned in this article, which show increases in math and reading skills.

There are not, as far as I am aware, any studies that look at the long-term effects of day care on adult stability and psychological health. There is anecdotal evidence that institutionalized care affects the ability to form relationships. A psychiatrist reacted to Belsky’s studies many years ago in The Atlantic Monthly. Ellen Ruppel Shell wrote:

The impression given by the report is quietly echoed by a handful of child-development experts. Dr. Eleanor Galenson, a prominent New York City child psychiatrist, told me that she has long considered full time child care to be bad for infants and that Belsky’s report simply confirmed what she saw in her practice every day — children whose psyches are seriously damaged in part because of a dearth of maternal attention. “Putting infants into full-time day care is a dangerous practice,” she says. “Psychiatrists have been afraid to come out and tell the public this, but many of us certainly know it to be true.”

Day care is also demonstrably dangerous to children’s health. The American Pediatric Association, as cited by Zinsmeister, has found that infants under one have eight times more colds and other sicknesses than children at home or in home settings. Recurrent ear infections are especially a problem, but more serious diseases such as cytomegalovirus, shigellosis, and hepatitis are also contracted in day care. Illness affects learning and development. Zinsmeister wrote:

When we checked my son into Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., to have a minor hernia repaired when he was young, I was struck to note that half of the children in the surgical ward were in for inner ear surgery, most to have mechanical drains installed to try to prevent eardrum ruptures. Increased day care transmission of disease is the major reason this has become a big problem among children today.

Committees of the the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended in the 1980s that to avoid chronic infections and childhood epidemics, children under two should be cared for only in the company of their siblings if at all possible. When that is impossible, the doctors urge that a small group of no more than six children, from no more than three families be used. Large groupings and groups with turnover among the children ought to be avoided when children are young, they suggest. This, obviously, would exclude most day care centers.

Despite this evidence, which is widely known, Katy Read wishes her sons had been raised in day care centers.

The reader replies:

Thank you very much for the reply, I wasn’t expecting that much information!

After a quick skim of the information you provided, one is immediately reminded of the nefarious nature of institutional environments. You can see correlating negatives in other similar social experiments such as compulsory schooling, Marxist communes, the Israeli Kibbutz, and the common rearing of an orphan. All of them remove the person from an environment of unconditional familial love during the most important times of their lives, and in the case of school, the most important time of the day. Then replace it with the cold, rigid and distant authoritarian relationship of unrelated institutional agents on a payroll—which seems to create a plethora of cognitive pathologies, and ultimately social pathologies as an end result. And now there is evidence of physiological diseases? Insane, but I cannot say it’s a shocking discovery. 

Karen I. writes:

Katy Read really is a crybaby. She also seems to want the best parts of every job she has and she has a bad attitude. She writes that when she was a reporter, an intern got to cover the story of an “honor student murdered by her mother’s crack dealer” while she “yawned through meetings where citizens complained about potholes”. When I was a reporter, I covered the worst crimes in the county every day. It was awful work that left me sleepless at night. Day after day, I sat in court listening to the sordid details of child molestation at sentencings. I saw pictures of murder victims and gruesome blood-covered evidence. I heard victim impact statements that haunt me over a decade later. And Katy Read thought she had it bad because she got to sit with town officials and cover potholes? She had it made. 

As a court reporter, I saw mothers cry almost every day. They cried as their children were sent to jail or as their children’s killers were sent to jail. I saw mothers cry over the fact they did not get help for their drug addicted children before they were sent to jail. I saw them cry because they were too permissive and looked away when their children went astray, not realizing the path would soon take them to the morgue or jail. I saw mothers cry over and over again for dozens of tragic reasons. I even saw a few cry because they left their children with seemingly nice babysitters who turned out to be child molesters. But I never saw a mother cry in court because she stayed home and took good care of her child. 

Katy Read wrote a lot about the up side of staying home with the kids. You’d think every day was playgrounds and cake, the way she romanticizes it. Like reporting, staying home with the kids has it’s down side. It is wrong for mothers to sugar-coat that fact because when a mother finally decides to stay home, she is in for a shock if all she expects is fun and games. There are days when the kids fight all day, days when everyone is throwing up from a virus, and days when nothing turns out right. Some days, the dirty dishes and laundry seem never ending. I suspect Read resented those days as much as she resented covering town meetings. Her writing exposes a huge sense of entitlement. She not only deserved to cover the best stories as a reporter, she also wanted to spend her days at the playground when she stayed home with the kids. She probably complained constantly to her (now ex) husband non-stop about the lack of money, how hard she worked, how bad she had it, and how much she gave up. 

Despite all of Read’s complaining, it is interesting that she says she has a “comfortable house.” I doubt her ex-husband also has a “comfortable house.” Divorces don’t happen overnight and Read had plenty of time prior to being on her own to consider her situation and start training for a field that has potential. She could still write on the side, but she could also get skills in a field like nurse’s aid, which takes about six weeks to train for, has a huge demand and pays fairly well starting out. If she does not like that, there are other jobs that she can quickly train for. There is no end of help for former homemakers to get on their feet and no homemaker should worry excessively about that. As Lydia Sherman said in an article, she’s never seen a woman wind up under a bridge because she took good care of her family. As an alternative to re-training, Ms. Read could continue trying to make money in a field that never paid well, even in the best of times. Then, she will have more excuses to complain!

Sara writes:

I’ve been a reader for quite some time…returning almost daily to this oasis in the desert. While I don’t always agree with everything that is asserted on this blog and the hard line you take against certain issues, I appreciate very much your common sense. This blog has made me think!

I am writing to comment on the “Crybaby Mother” post. I am a married woman with two young children. My husband and I have chosen to live a life that enabled me to stay at home, taking care of the children, the home, and our marriage. Sure there are days when I feel overwhelmed and frustrated. Who doesn’t have those days!? I am very aware of the preciousness of my family, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of my time, unnoticed work, and dedication if it meant I had to abandon my children to day cares and spend most of my time away from my home and husband. Never! I can’t understand the disgust that so many women feel toward their homes. It breaks my heart to imagine there little children sitting in day cares all day, wondering when mommy will come for them, constantly sick, cared for by people who get paid less than minimum wage!

I wanted to share with you what happened yesterday. My daughter is eight months old, and has just started teething. She was fussy, and clingy all day. She just wanted her momma. She wanted to be held close to my chest all day. That was all she needed. And it was my supreme delight to offer that place of nurturing and love to my little one. I will never forget lying in my bed with my baby as she nursed and cuddled up close to me. As she patted my face with her soft delicate hand I thought to myself, “This is it. Is there anything better than this?” We didn’t have to scurry in chaos to get ready for day care and work. I didn’t have to witness the look of resignation in my childrens’ eyes as I walked away from them, leaving them to the mercy of whomever happened to be with them at the day care center. We didn’t have to run here and there. We just stayed at home all day, my two children and me. We played games, rearranged my son’s room, cuddled, read books, and when my husband came home from work there was a hearty meal waiting. We ate by candle light. I made my a good meal and was very pleased to watch my husband eat well, knowing I had prepared something that blessed him and made him feel at home and at rest.

I have chosen to invest in the people who matter most to me. My husband, my children, other family, and closest family friends. As I rock my daughter to sleep or teach my son his ABC’s I am not only thinking of here and now. I am peering into a future. I am blessing my children who will bless my grandchildren who will continue the line onward. This is an honor and a beautiful thing. I really can’t understand how women can ignore this!

Marianne writes:

Your blog is a daily read for me, and I thank you for it.  Someone identified as “a reader” asked about research on the cognitive effects of day care.  Here is an extremely good article on a closely related topic:  the importance of the maternal/infant bond during the first three years of life.  

If a woman does not  want to stay at home until her children are grown, perhaps a sacrifice could be made just until the child is, say, three years old, or seven.  Here is the gist: 

“The most important property of humankind is the capacity to form and maintain relationships…. The systems in the human brain that allow us to form and maintain emotional relationships develop during infancy and the first years of life. Experiences during this early vulnerable period of life are critical… In the mental health field, attachment has come to reflect the global capacity to form relationships…. [B]onding is the process of forming an attachment…. An emotionally and physically healthy mother will be drawn to her infant — she will feel a physical longing to smell, cuddle, rock, coo, and gaze at her infant. In turn the infant will respond with snuggling, babbling, smiling, sucking, and clinging. In most cases, the mother’s behaviors bring pleasure and nourishment to the infant, and the infant’s behaviors bring pleasure and satisfaction to the mother. This reciprocal positive feedback loop, this maternal-infant dance, is where attachment develops…. The brain systems responsible for healthy emotional relationships will not develop in an optimal way without the right kinds of experiences at the right times in life….”

Josh F. writes:

The only reason a mother regrets taking the tougher path is that her heart was never in it in the first place. Modern liberal female finds  her “freedom” in taking an easier path. This “mother” regrets the  “freedom” she lost by making us believe that working for financial independence (autonomy from husband) is really much harder work than motherhood. On the contrary, her financial independence is almost  certainly subsidized by father while BEING mother is a deeply and intimately motherly pursuit (really autonomous of man). She had a chance to show true moral autonomy in being mother and instead chose  to pretend that choosing a career and leaving her children in the hands of others would have been a real show of her independence. It is all a lie.

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