At first, the mother's words in a recent opinion piece in The New York Times were what I expected. Joan Peters seemed to typify many moms of school-age kids sending the little ones back to class. Peters noted that during the school year she's actually busier than ever. She described the sign-up lists awaiting parents on opening day; snack duty this month, shelving books in the library the next. She says she was soon attending PTA meetings and planning sessions for a new playground.
Peters is the author of "When Mothers Work: Loving Our Children Without Sacrificing Our Selves." And she's outraged that American mothers are "doing double duty as parents and teachers."Peters challenges mothers to stop "leaving work to fulfill classroom duties," saying that instead "moms everywhere should threat-en politicians until they fix the problems." After all, she contends, while parents should be involved in their children's education, "they can't be expected to save the schools."
What a statement. The obvious question is, why shouldn't parents be expected to save the schools, even if not in the way Peters thinks?
But the larger point is that Peter's opinions exemplify a segment of our culture that resents the idea of parents sacrificing for their own children.
We routinely hear at the national level about the need to sacrifice for our children - but only in terms of spending tax dollars to provide them with health care, education or any "fill-in-the-blank" federal program. Would the backers of such "sacrifice" demand, for instance, that married couples who just don't generally get along stay together for the sake of their kids? No way. Nor, in fact, would most Americans. That's in contrast to the 1950s, when most Americans thought an unhappily married couple should stay together for the sake of the children.
U.S. News and World Report recently featured a cover story titled "The Lies Parents Tell About Work, Kids, Money, Day Care and Ambition." The authors of that piece note that even better off two-earner couples consistently say they both work full-time because they need the money. Further, they increasingly define "necessity" upward.
In 1975, the good life meant a car, a home, a lawn. Today it means a job that pays considerably above average, very nice clothes and a vacation home. Thus more and more moms with young kids feel they have to work.
Further, the article quotes the new book, "The Time Bind," in which sociologist Arlie Hochschild details how working parents "increasingly flee chaos at home for comfort and order at the office." These parents, moms in particular, may not admit it - but they just don't want to sacrifice their professional lives for their kids.
In elite culture, Peters clearly is not alone. The reasons for this trend in some circles may be numerous. Clearly, on a large scale, the carnage wrought by such a view is obvious and disastrous - and probably not yet fully realized.
But on a small scale, I just want to ask the parents that think this way: Why in the world did they have kids to begin with?