Courant on Warning to Stay-At-Home Moms
April 17th, 2007 by Peter
Last week I noted a Courant story on how today’s working moms experience motherly guilt despite a study saying they spend more “quality” time with their children than the mothers of 40 years ago. Yesterday the Courant followed up with a Q and A with Leslie Bennetts, author of a new book warning that it is the new stay-at-home-moms that are putting their children at risk:
Q: I thought women had discovered the flaws in the Prince Charming plan back in the ’60s and ’70s.
A: The women of the 1950s were blindsided by the divorce revolution of the ’70s. They ended up alone, abandoned and in desperate straits. In my interviews, a lot of the baby-boom generation said: “I saw what happened to my mother and my friends, and I said to myself I am never going to let that happen to me.” The baby-boom generation believed in this. Many have had rewarding work lives, enduring marriages and happy families.
But these younger women today are, I believe, far enough removed from that historical period that they either don’t know about it, or it has no reality for them. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed. …
As I said in the book, is it really worth it to be home when your second child loses his fourth tooth if something happens to your husband and you lose your home, not to mention being unable to pay the grocery bill? It seems to me that anybody who has children has to be prepared to take responsibility for supporting them.
Perhaps I missed it, but I’m still waiting for the Courant Q and A with the author of this book.
