The Dereliction of Homemaking

Imagine if, next Monday morning, nearly two thirds of the employees of a critical American industry don’t show up to work. Desks of important positions are abandoned, computers idle, phones unattended. Supervisors panic at this mass-resignation. Unless temporary help is found right away, the industry will unravel quickly. But these high-level employees are not easily replaced by typical “temps.” Over time, the industry begins to fail, meaning severe problems even on a national scale.

Sadly, this has happened to a major American industry. Not all within a day, but rather over a period of years.

That “industry” so critical to America’s well-being, the family, suffered job loss unparalleled in any company when wives and mothers began to leave their posts and enter the workforce in the name of greater equality.

From the early 1950s to the early ’70s, the percentage of children under 6 with working moms nearly doubled. Now, 62 percent of women with children under 6 work outside the home.

To fill the void left by this mass exodus, professional child care stepped in. In 1954, the U.S. government even began giving special relief to families who opted for day care by introducing a child-care tax credit.

Now, the fruits of these “temp” workers in the American business of family are evident.

In July 2003, results of a 10-year study of 1,000 children by the National Institutes of Health (nih), the U.S. government’s principal medical research agency, revealed something astonishing, yet quite predictable. The more time children spent in child care from birth to 4½ years old, the higher adults rated their levels of disobedience, assertiveness and aggressiveness. The press release announcing the results “cautioned” that for most of those children, “the levels of the behaviors reported were well within the normal range.” An easy way for researchers to dismiss results is to call them “normal”!

Those who trumpet such findings are pooh-poohed for making working mothers feel guilty. Fashion magazine editor and feminist Bonnie Fuller, author of The Joys of Much Too Much, complained in a National Post interview that all there is to read “out there” is “really negative stuff that makes you feel bad about yourself … [w]hen you’re doing everything right” (May 6).

Fuller tells working moms they’ve “got much too much going on in their lives, but those lives are very full, exciting lives, and I want them to look at it positively, not negatively—and stop angsting about it!” What is the worry here? That the children are endangered, or that women’s careers are?

Day-care advocates try to stigmatize stay-at-home moms by arguing that the children’s social development will be hindered—convincing parents that kids must be clustered together early in life to learn necessary people skills. Well, what did we ever do before the social messiah of day care? Is that our babies’ primary need—large groups? The 2003 nih research contradicted that assumption: The longer the children spent time in child care, the less likely they were to get along with others.

Consistently, studies have shown that the emotional development of the child—the capacity to love and to form attachments to other human beings—is greatest from conception to age 3. Stronger parental attachments lay a sturdy emotional foundation, upon which that child can more adequately develop good social skills. If day care is weakening those attachments, and even creating more aggressive children, what kind of social advancement is that for our world? The 2003 study also revealed that an even more influential factor of problem behavior than time spent in child care is maternal sensitivity, or how well a mother is attuned to her child’s needs, moods, interests and capabilities.

Our society is reeling from the effects of this en masse resignation. Should that not make women feel equal in need and importance to men? Can they not feel empowered by the fact that their role as wife and mother is so essential?

This is not to say there is never a need for institutionalized care. But let’s face facts: On the whole, when the jobs of mother and wife are neglected, the family unit—and the nation—suffers, despite what society tries to put in its place.