Don't stress out. Our kids are just fine when their mothers work late
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Version 0 of 1. Some welcome news for working moms: you can stay late at the office tonight and your kid will be just fine. A new study published this April in the Journal of Marriage and Family shows that the widely-held belief that young children do better when their mothers spend significant time with them is actually wrong: kids are okay no matter how many hours mom works. In fact, the stress of trying to live up to unrealistic parenting standards is likely more detrimental to children than a lack of time spent together. The so-called Mommy Wars aren’t just hurting women – they’re hurting kids, as well. The researchers, from three different universities, wrote that the larger cultural debate over women’s work-life balance and parenting is what, in part, sparked their interest in the topic: “Mother’s time is thought to be especially important, even irreplaceable, for the well-being of children”. But, despite the neverending guilt mothers are expected to feel for working outside the home, the results of the study showed that the amount of time parents – mothers, in particular – spend with young children doesn’t have a statistically significant impact on their development or well-being. What does make a difference? Mom’s “social status resources”, like her level of education and family income. But chiding women for being bad parents is far more popular than working to provide all families with support structures and resources like parental leave and affordable child care. Melissa Milkie, one of the study’s authors and a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, told me that moms are under a lot of cultural pressure: “There’s the belief that moms are the one responsible, moms are the one who should be there.” And that pressure – a piece of what the researchers call mothers’ general “distress” – does negatively impact kids. The worrying about time spent with our kids could, it seems, be more harmful that the lack of time spent itself. And while moms are so often led to believe that the early years of their child’s life is where their time matters most, the study shows it’s actually older children that benefit from engaged family time. Professor Milkie said that teens whose parents – both mom and dad – spend time doing activities with them fare better than teens with less engaged time. But still, Professor Milkie said, moms are the ones who are “held individually responsible”. “They feel they have to do everything on their own”, she told me. The sad truth is that we are far more interested in making women feel terrible about their life choices under the guise of caring about children than we are in actually helping children. And so long as the conversations about parenting focus on women’s choices – namely whether they’re right, wrong, or “selfish” – the debate will go nowhere. Professor Milkie said that we need to look at the big picture of what children really need. “It’s not necessarily more time with mothers, but things that support parents and mothers”, she explained. Policies that support parents and mothers include a living wage, affordable child care and flexible work arrangements that, yes, allow moms and dads to spend more time with their kids. Not because children will suffer if they don’t have that time, but because we love our kids and hanging out with them is fun and rewarding. I don’t expect that this study or any others will be enough to convince some people that we can value both parenting and the role of women in the public sphere. But maybe, just maybe, it’s enough to convince moms to stop feeling quite as guilty when we have to work late. Our kids are fine without us some times - a truth I think a lot of us already know, even if we’re not quite ready to admit it. |