Courant on Motherly Guilt
April 9th, 2007 by Peter
A Sunday Courant piece provides a local angle on a study we’ve been hearing a lot about:
Research recently delivered some good news to today’s mothers: They actually spend more so-called quality time with their children than mothers did 40 years ago, in the heyday of stay-at-home moms…According to a University of Maryland study, mothers in 1965 spent 10.2 hours a week in focused time with their children – feeding them, reading to them, playing games with them. That number declined in the ’70s and ’80s, rose in the 1990s, and now, at 14.1 hours per week, is higher than ever.
Even so, roughly half of mothers who work outside the home (and 18 percent of those who don’t) believe they aren’t spending enough time with their children.
Why the discrepancy? And is “quality time” itself an artificial construct invented to make working moms feel better?
That’s a question the Courant article won’t touch. But the paper does provide some interesting info, including quotes from mothers trying to find the right balance:
Jennifer Rancourt of Enfield worked full time when her oldest child was small because she had to. “You know, I felt like I gypped the first kid. He was always in day care or with my mother.”
So when she had two more children and had the financial flexibility to go part time, she did. Still, she feels extremely guilty whenever she steals a little time for herself.
“I don’t ever leave my office to go to lunch or anything because I feel so guilty,” she says.
Once recently, she did take time for lunch with her husband.
“I felt so guilty enjoying leisure time,” she says, and she hated seeing “those rich mothers eating lunch, strolling their kids.”
Why does Rancourt assume that the mothers she saw were rich? We know many families–particularly in homeschooling circles–who make all sorts of financial sacrifices so that one parent can be home with the children.
More:
Jill Bourque of Bristol e-mails that she feels “wracked with guilt” about not getting to spend more time with her 9-year-old daughter.
“I’d like to be the one to get her off the bus and put her on the bus, but I can’t. I’m the primary provider,” she says. “I would like to be Betty Crocker, but I’d also like to have a career.”…
“Everyone tells me I shouldn’t feel guilty,” says Bourque. Her fiancé tells her, “You’re doing 100 times better than what your parents did for you and a thousand times better than what their parents did for them. Where does the line get drawn? Where is enough enough?”
Jill Bourque, like most women who came of age in the 80s, was led down the primrose path to “having it all”. Isn’t it just great!? She gets her career and children, all without daddy around to mess things up. So why isn’t she happy? Because women of my generation were sold, what’s called in legal terms, a “false bill of goods” by well-intentioned feminists. We were promised relief from the drudgery of being at home with children by simply placing them in the “care” of semi-strangers – only to find out that when we gained a career, all we really gained was a SECOND job. We now need the income from our career to pay the heavy college debt and goodies we purchased before we had kids (i.e., the large home), but still get to be the primary caregiver and caretaker at home (because face it ladies, we are just better at it). Gee, thanks! And no, you won’t hear Jill’s fiance object. No, he’ll cheer her on, telling her she is doing a swell job. Because, it’s the men who benefit when women “have it all”.
I look forward to watching the Family Institute lobby for paid family leave, increased wages to enable one parent to stay home, the right to organize unions, and better child care funding and quality. Ha!
I never tire of telling people that my wife has the most important, crucial & necessary job in the world. And I mean it sincerely. She stays home with our children. Sometimes women in the office will offer comments indicating that they cannot identify with my wife’s decision to stay home, often vocalizing their impressions of her situation in dreary, oppressive terms. I can only say to them that my wife has chosen to totally give of herself in this way in order to form the minds and hearts of those that will one day help to order and guide society. Then I look around at the cubicle laden office and say, “and we’re here to pay bills.” I wonder who is truly oppressed. Women of the west have lost their sense of worth of their highest vocation, and have sacrificed their birthright for a meal.
I was a stay home Mom, giving my ALL to my children, but I found out, to my great disappointment, that children ‘are not your children’, (a guote) and no amount of devotion to them , as well as the so called UNCONDITIONAL LOVE, molds their CHARACTER.