We do have a “Mommy” problem. And a “Daddy” problem. It’s a “Baby” problem and a “Kiddie” problem. It’s even a “Grammy” and “Grampy” problem, and if you can think of any other cutesy monikers we can attach to parents and families, it’s that kind of problem, too.
At one end of our society, that problem manifests itself this way, as Heather Havrilesky entertainingly wrote this past weekend: “some combination of overzealous parenting, savvy marketing and glorification of hearth and home have coaxed the public into viewing female parents as a strange breed apart from regular people. You might feel like the same person deep inside, but what the world apparently sees is a woman lugging around a giant umbilical cord.”
That “giant umbilical cord” weighs even more if you’re lugging it to your low-wage job. Maybe you’re spending half of a full-time salary on day care and hoping to qualify for a subsidy, only to be told that the only way to get help would be to quit a good job. Maybe you are raising your grandchildren instead of saving for retirement, working two shifts and glad to have 24-hour day care available, or taking two buses after a day working at McDonald’s to pick up the children.
What links the frustrations of the relatively fortunate, whose decision to raise their children in the way they prefer comes at the expense of the career they had imagined, with the graver problems of parents whose hours spent at low-wage jobs can cost them their ability to raise their children in the way they would like? The belief, embedded in nearly every element of our society, that families aren’t a national resource, but an individual cost.
If you are a woman with children, the expectation that you are first and foremost a mother (or a grandmother) doesn’t just mean that you will be constantly judged and slotted into the “mommy” role. It also means that it’s on you, and entirely on you, to turn those children into self-supporting adults. Dads, that affects you in a different way: You may not have to assume a “dad” identity fully, but if you are part of the family picture, you, too, can’t expect much external help in the struggle to support a family both economically and emotionally.
As a nation, we choose subsidizing corn syrup over child care. We spend $7 on programs for elderly people for every $1 spent on programs for the very young. We do not mandate family leave for many employees. Employers who want to support families are required to do so at the risk of being disadvantaged in their industries; employees with less supportive employers are required to make their own adjustments and sacrifices when a family member needs care.
We all, at every point on the economic spectrum, make choices based in part on extremal factors. Whether the choice is a “lucky” one (professional career + child care versus freelance work + children with parent) or Hobson’s (work + send child to park to play alone versus quit job + take care of child at home), that choice is affected by societal constraints, including the one that says children are a form of personal consumption rather than “little human capital units that are likely to grow up, get jobs, pay taxes and raise little human capital units of their own” — and, of course, the one that says women are the primary consumers of what we have somehow decreed is a luxury good.
I hate being called “mom” and “mommy” by anyone other than my children as much as the next person, and maybe more than most. But one reason I hate it is this: The underlying assumption that I, and millions of other women, have made some kind of adorable lifestyle choice means that no one else need consider the needs of the children who result.
No one but “mommy” needs to worry about where her children go after school, whether she is at home in front of her computer or heading into the seventh hour of her shift. No one but “mommy” needs to figure out what to do with that helpless infant during a court appearance or job interview. If “daddy” steps up to the plate? Why, he is “providing child care” for “mommy.” And if “mommy’s” catch-as-catch-can system leaves a gap between her children’s experience and those of more fortunate children so wide that you could drive a truck full of Webster’s New World College Dictionaries through it? That is the way the cookie crumbles.
A “mommy problem” indeed.