Hello! For many years I’ve edited the blog MarriageDebate, which started as a project of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy. Over the years the purpose of the blog shifted, to the point where I’m now bringing it over to First Things with the title “Kinship and Culture.” Posts to the blog also will be appearing on “First Thoughts,” the magazine’s primary blog.
I try to truffle up unexpected or thought-provoking articles on issues relating to marriage, family, gender, and kinship; you can go over to the original site to see what kinds of things tend to interest me. Note that links aren’t endorsements! They’re things I think ask good questions, serve as indicators of where we are culturally, or restate important problems. I will try to cover a broad range of topics, but there are definitely recurring themes, like “emerging adulthood,” friendship, and the effects of the economic crisis.
If you want to know where I’m coming from personally on these issues, here’s a piece I wrote on counseling at a pregnancy center; one on the problems with a culture of fear of divorce; all the posts on my old personal blog tagged “marriage“; and all the “marriage” posts on my new blog.
Here’s your first link, from the New York Times‘s parenting blog.
“This is not about advice for women,” the University of Akron sociologist Adrianne M. Frech said of her latest research, which showed that women who work steadily full-time after the birth of their first child report better physical health than women who don’t.
Dr. Frech and her co-author, Sarah Damaske, considered nearly 30 years of data provided by 2,540 mothers as participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. They sorted the women into four mutually exclusive work pathways: “steadily working women, women who pulled back from full-time work following the first birth, women with repeated bouts of unemployment while attempting to work full-time — interrupted work careers — and stay-at-home mothers who did not work for pay and did not seek work.”
They found that the steadily working mothers were relatively advantaged before giving birth to their first children, and that the advantages, at least in the area of the women’s mental and physical health, did not just continue as they reached age 40, but increased (even when the researchers controlled for other variables). “It’s not just that they were advantaged before,” Dr. Frech said. “Even when you remove all the statistical noise, there are apparently added advantages from work.
August 29th, 2012 | 11:28 pm
Maybe the lower health for stay at home moms is partially because of oppressive isolation and lack of social support?
August 30th, 2012 | 12:15 am
I am doubtful of the author’s facts, but it’s disconcerting to read them nonetheless.
Am I wrong or is it problematic to be using the anti-Catholic newspaper, the New York Times, as a source for facts by a Catholic blogger?
August 30th, 2012 | 3:58 am
It failed to mention that these poor mothers miss out on the most tender and formative years of their babies lives. First Steps, first words, giving them a kiss and singing to them before afternoon nap etc. Bonding, trust, and knowing that your mum is there for you – no matter what is what kids need. Yes it is hard work, but tell me… What job is more important than that?
August 30th, 2012 | 7:26 am
Suppose you discover that birds with bright feathers produce more viable offspring; is it because bright feathers are good for attracting a healthy mate? because bright feathers are an indication of health? because good foraging ability tends to produce both bright feathers and healthy offspring?
Obviously, all of the above, to varying extents. But it does not follow that dyeing an unhealthy bird’s feathers with bright-colored dye will make him produce more healthy offspring.
August 30th, 2012 | 7:55 am
Mr Edwards,
I understand your initial thought; however, I think Ms Tushnet makes the goals of her project fairly clear in this statement:
“I try to truffle up unexpected or thought-provoking articles on issues relating to marriage, family, gender, and kinship … Note that links aren’t endorsements! They’re things I think ask good questions, serve as indicators of where we are culturally, or restate important problems.”
In my opinion, and I could be wrong, this article embodies all three ‘characteristics’ she lists in the last sentence of the quotation above.
August 30th, 2012 | 8:01 am
I, like many others, find the cliched contrast between “to work” and “to stay at home” unhelpful, except of course to describe an existing situation without the ability to describe the many and diverse “whys” of the matter.
Unhelpful, first of all, because it erases the distinctions among the many ways in which women approach and shape their lives – between for example “stay at home mothers” working at home, in the community, and in their churches, and women employed outside of the home in some type of commercial or professional endeavor. Its frame of reference cannot (and is not intended to) encompass the vast differences between types of employment and levels of income as they relate to women’s health; also particular personality traits and points of view regarding the meaning of life.
Comparing the health of a woman who organizes her unpaid (but certainly possibly life affirming and rewarding) work around her responsibilities as a homemaker, a school volunteer or a home schooling teacher, a church volunteer, a helper of friends and family members in need with the health of a woman whose temperament and/or circumstances, (motherhood without the support of the children’s father or another vital and important factor) require that she receive monetary reward for her work simply does not, in my opinion, allow the kinds of dichotomies set up by Dr. Frech’s study to lead us toward any particular conclusion. There are far too many variables, all of which need to be taken under consideration.
This is not to assert that this type of study does not offer a way to at least begin serious discussion. For instance, if most women are employed away from home and their children are in day care or school and after school programs, those who work from home may have to do so as members, more or less, of a “cognitive minority,” a lonely place to be. For readers of First Things this might prompt discussion of ways in which women who work at home can be supported through planned rather than informal associations which formerly existed in the context of neighborhood and community.
August 30th, 2012 | 8:30 am
I dont think Ms. Tushnet is endorsing the study. She is merely reporting it. As for the report itself I’m personally skeptical. I’d suspect the women who worked full time from the birth of their children were probably driven, high IQ, high energy individuals to begin with. the type of people who would have had better health outcomes against the mean regardless. To paraphrase Jim Manzi, beware high causal density.
August 30th, 2012 | 9:35 am
Very important line in the article:
August 30th, 2012 | 9:49 am
As a first impression, the study, as described, seems to say that if you are doing well, having a baby will help you do better. Beyond that, it seems to be reaching in its conclusions. For me, this seems natural though I can imagine it is counter-intuitive for a segment of the population.
August 30th, 2012 | 9:50 am
If it is a fact that women who work full time outside the home are found to score more highly on certain measures of health than women who don’t, then no matter what your ideology, you have to deal with that fact. Of course, one study doesn’t establish such things as facts, but I don’t think the response to a study one doesn’t like should be to claim it can’t be correct. Not everything one wants to be true is true.
It is a little disingenuous, I think, for conservatives to object to a study that purports to show the benefits of work when it has been the conservative agenda preach the advantages of stay-at-home motherhood when for decades they have been trying to make sure that poor mothers don’t get help to stay at home and raise children but instead must get out of the house and work. Stay-at-home motherhood is is apparently recommended if you are well off enough to afford it, but if you need assistance to stay home and care for your children, that’s too bad. Get out and work!
August 30th, 2012 | 11:32 am
Justin,
Fair enough.
Ms. Tushnet did a fine job of provoking thought.
Good job Eve!
:)
August 30th, 2012 | 11:35 am
Re: Comment by David Nickol
Very well known is the fact that well-intentioned policy decisions can have unintended consequences, some of them terrible.
The situation of mothers and children, particularly those who have been abandoned by the children’s father or, for any reason, do not receive support from the children’s father, whose numbers greatly increased in the recent past, had to be attended to quickly. There is no time for deliberation to be carefully carried on while children suffer. People of good will of both political parties (I emphasize people of good will) developed plans that seemed to provide answers. Almost all were flawed in some way.
Massive sums of money were spent on public assistance and housing, health services, etc.
This provided temporary relief and solace. But very few think that they provided long term solutions for the best well-being of all concerned.
Other solutions were proposed and decided upon by members of both political parties. Welfare without responsibility had harmed many recipients. Long term public assistance did not provide ways to develop a sense of “agency” (as the wonderful Mia Love has said). The recipients often felt deprived of a sense of themselves as “acting persons.”
Another solution was proposed – a kind of earned welfare. I am not familiar with the details but understand that this plan was put into place under President Clinton and was until recently considered to have been of some good.
In any event, people of good will, conservative, liberal, Tocquevillian liberal conservatives, neo-conservatives, progressive, do not have the selfish, disrespectful attitude described by David Nickol.
In this time of upheaval regarding parenthood, marriage, family, individual responsibility, and the role of government, it is not surprising that confusion reigns.
The unintended consequence of welfare was diminution of personal agency; the unintended consequence of workfare was separation of mothers from their children.
Harsh words and calumny have no place and no positive role to play – not, that is, among those striving for the best well-being of all concerned.
August 30th, 2012 | 1:26 pm
David Alexander, full-time mothers live in their communities, not on the moon. A woman who stays home with her children, especially a homeschooling mother, can be as much or as little involved with her community as she chooses.
August 30th, 2012 | 2:19 pm
The unintended consequence of welfare was diminution of personal agency; the unintended consequence of workfare was separation of mothers from their children.
Linda Wolpert Smith,
And separation of children from their mothers. Whatever the reasons, let’s not pretend that there’s no irony in the group that praised stay-at-home motherhood was basically the same group that wanted “welfare mothers” to leave the kids at home and get to work.
And here in this thread we have people resisting the idea that it might be healthier for mothers to work outside the home, as if working outside the home was not to be encouraged.
Part of the conservative ethos is that work is the important thing in life. Certainly this is found in Ayn Rand. It has been years since I read Atlas Shrugged, but I am quite sure there are no hymns to motherhood or stay-at-home moms in it.
It doesn’t sound like Ann Romney staying at home and raising five boys.
August 30th, 2012 | 3:16 pm
As I previously wrote, among people of good will, conservatives, liberals, progressives, liberal conservatives, conservative liberals, again, among people of good will, no claim is made to possess the definitive answer to this problem. There are enough mistakes to go around. Positive suggestions are needed. Attempts to assign blame are not useful.
Children whose fathers are absent are at risk as are mothers who must manage on their own. I hope that David Nickol does not place the blame for the recent increase in broken families, absent fathers, and births outside of marriage to any type of conservative thinking.
References to Ayn Rand seem anachronistic and an attempt to fit conservatives of many different points of view into one mold. Paul Ryan at one time during his education apparently read Ayn Rand and was for a time impressed by her thought. (Those of us who comment here are perhaps fortunate that no research is being carried out into our personal forays into various philosophical and theological systems.) His life speaks for itself as to how much of her thought had enduring effect. Perhaps you mistake his understanding of the meaning of “creative work”. The creative work of his mother, his wife, his friends, and that of Mitt and Ann Romney are encompassed by his comprehensive understanding of those words.
August 31st, 2012 | 8:52 am
My experience with maternity leave is that employers will penalize you for using your benefits. There is a definite anti-child, anti-mother bias in the work place, and living under threat of job loss/demotion during pregnancy and during the first years of your children’s lives probably goes a long way in increasing the stress of mothers staying at home a year after their children are born. This study calls for others.
August 31st, 2012 | 11:20 am
“David Alexander, full-time mothers live in their communities, not on the moon. A woman who stays home with her children, especially a homeschooling mother, can be as much or as little involved with her community as she chooses.”
Yes and no. That ought to be the case, but my own history (when I had small children) does not bear it out too well. I lived hundreds of miles from my extended family, and moved to a new city while I already had very small children — thus limiting my ability to form new relationships that would form that support network. I was involved in a church — where the other women were a combination of similarly situated with myself, working full-time outside the home, or quite busy with their own adult children and grandchildren. My kids weren’t old enough, at that time, to permit me to be involved in any kind of homeschooling network.
It was sort of a Catch-22 — since I didn’t already have the kind of social contacts that would give me support in that situation, I couldn’t form them. And I’ve no doubt that it affected, or at least potentially affected, my overall physical well-being.
I think we have to be careful when asserting that full-time motherhood *need not be* isolating and lacking support (which is certainly the case), not to deny that it very frequently, because of particular circumstances, *is.*
August 31st, 2012 | 9:17 pm
Elinor, I think it is probably truer to say that I live on the moon than that a random stay-at-home mom does. I do think pentamom makes a good point but I also think that the atomization of society is only one factor.
When I was reading Chantal Delsol’s Icarus Fallen, I was reminded of this discussion, and I think her analysis strikes a deep chord. My initial thought was that, assuming the article is true, perhaps this is a result of the atomization of neighborhoods and the isolation of care-givers. I think that is plausible as a factor but I think Delsol’s analysis goes deeper and broader. She notes the depreciation and derision for care-giving, especially unpaid care-giving, in our society. As David Nickols points out must grapple with these findings if true but it seems the secularists, liberals and anti-religious must reckon as well with them. The depreciation of unpaid caregiving in society results no doubt in great stress of many kinds for such caregivers, both in psychologically and in the bereftment of resources and relational support and financial stress. Permit me to quote Delsol at length:
“The access women have gained to social success is part of the spread of knowledge to everyone, and of the substitution of status based on merit for status based on birth. But this sort of revolution, the consequences of which we have yet to see play out, is also a response to the depreciation of caregiving activities. The women of yesterday were the guardians of immeasurable values and, as a rule, found in these values their essential reason for being. But if they were able to work without wages or social recognition, it was because the society of their time gave so much importance to their activities…through a shift in interpretation the ‘useless servant’ has become a ‘superfluous man,’ to use a term from nineteenth century Russia. An entire population given over to activities of care-giving, and especially child-rearing mothers, suddenly found themselves de-valued. And so this population, in order to avoid contempt, was eager to enter the world of production. The values of care-giving disintegrated and seemed to lose their intrinsic importance…For the past century, our desire to detach ourselves from religion’s constraints, and our concomitant depreciation of spiritual values, have led us to transfer more and more care-giving activities to salaried employees…Nothing today…is more depreciated than the care-giving activities that still go unremunerated, which are simply considered the occupations of the idle. This is why the dream of our contemporary is to have a society in which all care-giving activities are exercised by wage-earners…Never before has society been in so great a need of solicitude toward human beings, and yet never before has it held this solicitude in such contempt, especially when it goes unremunerated.”
-Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen, (2003), pgs. 154,155,156
Evidence of this depreciation for care-giving I think can be found in the current clamor to redefine marriage, the most child-friendly institute on the planet, in such a way as to remove the biological nexus to children altogether from the essential idea of marriage.
September 1st, 2012 | 3:05 pm
I, like many others, find the cliched contrast between “to work” and “to stay at home” unhelpful
When I think of the women in my own family I am struck by how many variables exist.
For example:
One stay-at-home stopped working because her husband was in a high-stress job that required lots of overtime and lots of travel.
One working mom lives near her family home – and could not continue working if not for the generous support from the mom.
More than one stay-at-home mom has difficulty finding and retaining because of health problems.
The real questions that impact health are not likely to be work vs. not-work, but questions of support, access to resources, etc.
I am inclined to believe that healthier women, with better access to resources and stronger “networks”, are more likely to return to the workforce after their children are born than women who suffer from poorer health, lack of resources – especially inadequate support – and inadequate ‘networks’.
Another question I’d be interested in seeing relates to maternity leave and re-entry difficulties. A woman who stays away from the working world more than a few months is going to increasingly find herself stigmatized on both a career level and emotionally. How many stay-at-homes wanted to be forever-stay-at-homes, and how many would have re-entered the workforce when the children were school age, but for some reason had difficulty getting a job in line with their needs or expectations?
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