A sizable minority of children in rich countries live with just one parent — a parent who is likely to be female, and also likely to be working.

Those are some of the takeaways from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s recent coverage this week of women in the world.

Across the industrialized world, about 15.9 percent of children live in single-parent households. The United States is at the higher end of the single-parent spectrum, with 25.8 percent of its children living with just a mother or a father. ...

The purple bars represent the proportion of children who live with both parents (whether or not those parents are married). Note the length of the pink bars, which represent the share of children living with single mothers, relative to that of the blue bars, which represent the share living with single fathers.

The only country where single fathers look like more than a faint sliver is Belgium, where there are still nearly twice as many children living with single mothers as with single fathers.

Labels: Fathers, motherhood, single parenting

posted by Eve at 8:54 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

In november 2009, one of the uglier fruits of the current practice of seeding mothers into the American military burst briefly onto the national stage. Ordered to Afghanistan from Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia, an Army cook named Alexis Hutchinson refused to go. A 21-year-old single mother, she explained that there was no one to care for her infant son because initial plans to leave him with her own mother had fallen through.

What happened next should disturb anyone who has so far succeeded in ignoring the fact that the United States now sends soldier-mothers off to war. Specialist Hutchinson was arrested and threatened with court martial and her son was temporarily placed in foster care — because, as the Fort Stewart spokesman explained, the 30-day extension that she had been granted was “plenty of time” to find some other babysitter for that ten-month-old while the only parent seemingly present in his life went off to Afghanistan. ...

According to an October report issued by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, 30,000 single mothers have served in those two war zones as of March 2009. That is 30,000< mothers forced to choose, as Hutchinson’s lawyer has put it, between their children and their service careers — a dilemma captured perfectly in a photograph that appeared alongside news accounts of the case. It showed what once would have seemed an unthinkable representation of Madonna and child: Spc. Hutchinson, a female soldier, cradling her baby in classic maternal pose.

Once, pregnancy itself was automatically grounds for discharge from the services. Today it is not. Now pregnant soldiers can request such a discharge, and commanders usually must grant it, but many mothers choose to stay. As to maternity leave, the services generally offer new mothers six weeks beginning the day they leave the hospital. After that they can receive deployment deferrals of anywhere from four months (Air Force) to six months (Army, Marines) to 12 (Navy). Note that of all these, only the Navy offers a deferral that even meets the American Academy of Pediatric’s guideline for breastfeeding, 12 months. Bear in mind too that current deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, at 15< months in length, are longer than any of these deferrals.

Labels: culture, motherhood, single parenting

posted by Eve at 8:22 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Today, National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) released Mama Says: A National Survey of Moms' Attitudes on Fathering, the first-ever national survey taking an in-depth look at how today's mothers view fathers and fatherhood.

The survey's most revealing findings deal with the enormous gulf between the assessments of fathers by mothers who are married to or live with their children's dads and those who do not. More than 8 in 10 mothers married to or living with the father of their children were satisfied with his performance as a dad, but only 2 of 10 mothers not living with the father were satisfied.

Furthermore, only 1 of 3 moms not living with dad reported a "close and warm" relationship between their child and the father, while nearly 9 in 10 married mothers classified the relationship as close and warm. A majority of mothers - 2 of 3 - agreed that fathers perform best if they are married to the mothers of their children. ...

The most troublesome finding for those who view fathers as playing unique roles in their children lives is the majority opinion among mothers that fathers are replaceable by moms or other men. More than half of the moms agree that fathers are replaceable by moms, and 2 of 3 moms agree that fathers are replaceable by other men. However, in a national survey of dads' attitudes on fatherhood, Pop's Culture, released by NFI in 2006, similar but slightly lower proportions of fathers agreed with these statements.

Therefore, it seems to be a majority view in the American public that fathers are replaceable despite near universal agreement that there is a father absence crisis in the United States - 93 percent and 91 percent of moms and dads, respectively, agree that such a crisis exists. The mothers who feel fathers are replaceable but feel there is a father absence crisis may believe that while possible, it is unlikely that an adequate substitute for a missing father can be found.

Labels: cohabitation, Fathers, Marriage, motherhood, National Fatherhood Initiative, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Eve at 11:58 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The day Charles Moses Martin Goodrich entered the world, a new community was conceived.

As the newborn breathed in life, his mother, Susan Goodrich, began to die. Less than 12 hours after having her son, the 46-year-old mother of four was gone. The cause was a rare amniotic fluid embolism.

It was January 2009, and shell-shocked widower Robbie Goodrich was forced to immediately think of the baby's most basic need: milk.

Labels: breastfeeding, motherhood

posted by Eve at 5:20 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Baumgardner also allows that Greer’s books may have self-contradictory elements, and I must admit that as a 21st-century reader, I’ve found that they can be choppy and manifesto-like, with off-putting wild generalizations and quasi-magical terminology. (Of course, this can also be said of third-wave feminists’ writings, e.g., Naomi Wolf’s.) Shulamith Firestone deems motherhood “a condition of terminal psychological and social decay, total self-abnegation and physical deterioration.” And Greer veers off in some directions that left me nonplussed (the taste of the menstrual blood of myself or others is something I’m happy to leave to the imagination). But then I turned to her chapter called “Family,” in which she argues that “stem”—or extended, multigenerational—households are inordinately stable; as opposed to today’s two-parent nuclear families, stem homes can never be “broken,” as their success does not “rest on the frail shoulders of two bewildered individuals trying to apply a contradictory blueprint.

Bingo. What better phrase to describe marriage among those of my own bewildered demographic slice—parents of the Creative Class? We start with the best of intentions. In her 20s, the Creative Class female carves out a cool Creative Class career, like Writer. She meets a man with an equally cool Creative Class job—say, Devoted Documentary Filmmaker of the Obama 10-Year African Kiva Water Project. In their 30s, the baby comes: the Creative Class mom is pitched into hormonal bliss (at least at first); the very same week—argh, the timing!—Gates Foundation money suddenly comes through for the Obama-kiva-water-project documentary. Clinking champagne glasses, both spouses agree that Dad must fly to Africa for two months to finish filming while Mom cares for the baby. (The last thing she wants is be a 1950s nag—and how rarely does Gates money come through, how important is drinking water for Africa?)

After kissing her husband goodbye, the Creative Class mother now begins to care for their baby, alone, in New York, or Los Angeles, or whatever cool city they’ve moved to. She’s isolated from her stem family—the grandma, aunts, and in-laws (who all love children!) have long been left behind in notoriously un-Creative Lompoc, Fort Lauderdale, or Ohio. She can barely maneuver the stroller down the four flights of stairs to get to Gymboree ($20 for 45 minutes, and you have to actually stay with your nine-month-old and drum). Result: the 21st-century Creative Class mom’s life is actually far worse than that of her 1950s counterpart. Her husband works as many hours (and travels more), but life is uncomfortable on his salary alone, and the isolated mom has no bingo-playing moms’ group to ease the unnatural, teeth-chattering stress of one-on-one care of her child.

Labels: adultery, extended family, Marriage, motherhood

posted by Eve at 11:58 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Angela Carter once said that "paternal parentage is often clouded in a way that maternity is not." She was talking about Wise Children, her novel concerned with the slippery, unknowable nature of paternity.

The essential mechanics of reproduction have always put women at an advantage in any question over parentage. We know the truth, whatever it may be, about our offspring; men just have to take our word for it. But in the time since Wise Children was published, this imbalance has shifted. For some women, the idea of maternity is suddenly not so assured.

Last month, Carolyn Savage from Ohio handed over her baby to its biological parents. She had been implanted with the wrong embryo after a mix-up at a fertility clinic. This came after a number of other IVF errors. In June, a couple from Cardiff were told that their last remaining frozen embryo had been mistakenly implanted in another woman, who had since had it aborted. In the same month, it was revealed that a white Northern Irish couple had given birth to a mixed-race baby, after being given the wrong sperm. And the instances go on. A Californian woman was awarded $1m in 2004 after a fertility specialist gave her the wrong embryo and hid the mistake until the baby was 10 months old. A white New Yorker gave birth to a black baby in 1998, sparking a complex, two-year legal wrangle between the two couples for visitation rights.

In vitro fertilisation is a booming industry. Around 12,500 babies a year are born in the UK as a result of IVF. More than 36,000 women a year attend the UK's 136 clinics for treatment. That's a lot of embryos in a lot of petri dishes in a lot of freezers. You can see how the occasional mistake happens: all it would take is a technician's moment of inattention, the phone ringing, a colleague asking a question, and – just like that – the wrong petri dish is plucked from the shelf and a terrible, private tragedy is set in motion.

The number of cases which come to light is small but it begs the question: just how many of these slip-ups go undetected? ...

One fertility counsellor – who does not want to be named – says that she deals with an increasing number of people who fear that the clinic may have made a mistake. "It's an issue for a lot of couples, particularly the women. Mothers need to be sure of that bond and it's not uncommon to experience doubt."

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, gender differences, IVF, motherhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 7:59 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

It used to irk Melissa Calapini when her 3-year-old daughter, Haley, hung around her father while he fixed his cars. Ms. Calapini thought there were more enriching things the little girl could be doing with her time.

But since the couple attended a parenting course — to save their relationship, which had become overwhelmed by arguments about rearing their children — Ms. Calapini has had a change of heart. Now she encourages the father-daughter car talk.

“Daddy’s bonding time with his girls is working on cars,” said Ms. Calapini, of Olivehurst, Calif. “He has his own way of communicating with them, and that’s O.K.”

As much as mothers want their partners to be involved with their children, experts say they often unintentionally discourage men from doing so. Because mothering is their realm, some women micromanage fathers and expect them to do things their way, said Marsha Kline Pruett, a professor at the Smith College School for Social Work at Smith College and a co-author of the new book “Partnership Parenting,” with her husband, the child psychiatrist Dr. Kyle Pruett (Da Capo Press).

Yet a mother’s support of the father turns out to be a critical factor in his involvement with their children, experts say — even when a couple is divorced.

“In the last 20 years, everyone’s been talking about how important it is for fathers to be involved,” said Sara S. McLanahan, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton. “But now the idea is that the better the couple gets along, the better it is for the child.”

Her research, part of a project based at Princeton and called the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, found that when couples scored high on positive relationship traits like willingness to compromise, expressing affection or love for their partner, encouraging or helping partners to do things that were important to them, and having an absence of insults and criticism, the father was significantly more likely to be engaged with his children.

Uninvolved fathers have long been accused of lacking motivation. But research shows that many societal obstacles conspire against them. Even as more fathers are changing diapers, dropping the children off at school and coaching soccer, they are often pushed aside in ways large and small.

Labels: Fathers, motherhood, parenting, poverty

posted by Eve at 7:49 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

I’ve been mulling over a recent news story from Australia that someone sent to me. It’s a rather complicated tale.

Ms. Fabian and Ms. Halifax (they only give last names in the story) were in a relationship for about seven years. During that time, each of them gave birth to a child. Ms. Halifax used sperm from a family friend, identified as Mr. Dalton. That child is now seven. Ms. Fabian used sperm from an anonymous donor. That child, a girl, is the subject of the litigation. She is now three.

The two women separated when the daughter was 20 months old. At the time they lived in Queensland, but at least Ms. Fabian, and perhaps both, were from New South Wales. Ms. Fabian now wants to return to New South Wales.

Her request to move is being opposed not only by her former partner, Ms. Halifax, but also by a gay male couple. According to the newspaper story, this couple “cannot be named,” but one of them is apparently the donor for the other child, which would mean he is Mr. Dalton. An Australian court has determined that she should not move while the requests of the various parties are considered. ...

I cannot help but contrast this with the evidence women asserting claims to be de facto parents produce. You can find at least half-a-dozen cases that I’ve discussed on the blog–some where the women won and some where the women lost. But win or lose, the evidence offered by the women I’m thinking of is qualitatively different. It’s far more about the hands-on care offered than about the public acknowledgement.

In truth, it seems to me that the men are claiming rights on a basis akin to holding out. Perhaps that is not so surprising. If you go back and read that earlier post (and the ones that follow) you will see this is a historically male path to parenthood. It makes me wonder if this legacy of gendered family law will find its way into the legal regulation of decidedly modern families.

Labels: Australia, de facto parenting, Fathers, gender, gender differences, Julie Shapiro, motherhood

posted by Eve at 3:45 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A HOMOSEXUAL couple has been granted leave to appear before the Family Court in a bid to gain access to a girl who isn't biologically related to either of them.

The men, who cannot be named, have successfully argued that they are important people in the life of the three-year-old.

The girl, who likewise cannot be named, was not conceived with sperm from either of the men. But her mother was, until last year, in a same-sex relationship with another woman who does have a child conceived with one of the men's sperm. ...

The magistrate accepted the mother's argument that she was "less committed to the non-traditional family arrangement enthusiastically embraced by her former partner". However, she said the mother had encouraged the men to have a relationship with her child while she was with the other woman.

She said the men were "publicly acknowledged as father figures" during the life of the relationship, while both women were the established "mother figures".

Those roles were acknowledged at a naming ceremony, where all four adults affirmed their commitment as "parents" of the child.

The men told the court they were involved in the parenting of both children. They attended the mother's 12-week pregnancy scan, and visited the hospital on the day of the child's birth. All four adults also attended annual gay pride parades, marching in the "family" section.

The men were introduced as "daddy" to friends and family, and were listed as emergency contacts at the child's daycare centre. ...

The child has been living with the four adults in three separate households since March.

Labels: Australia, de facto parenting, donor conception, gay parenting, motherhood

posted by Imapp Staff at 3:29 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

At first glance, the forum didn’t seem to belong among the weighty discussions of the day, which included surviving the recession, increasing minority businesses, caring for homeless veterans, and decreasing deaths from cancer.

But examining the state of Black marriages and families was as integral to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s 39th Annual Legislative Conference as the other workshops, said its sponsor, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton.

“I’m not having a forum on the kinds of things that as a policy wonk you might expect me to have,” the Washington, D.C. Democrat told the overflow crowd gathered for a discussion titled “Single Women, Unmarried Men – What Has Happened to Marriage in the Black Community.” “[But] the kind of policies I’m dealing with in Congress... are at least significantly tied to what is happening to the African-American family.”

Having a substantive conversation on the matter has been difficult, the longtime lawmaker said.

“Ever since the Moynihan Report, people didn’t want to talk about single-parent households,” Norton said. “That’s because, first of all, the Moynihan Report didn’t come out of us. And it came out just after the civil rights bills had passed and it made people angry because White America hadn’t taken responsibility for its huge part of what had torn the African-American community apart. So nobody wanted to hear it.”

The Moynihan Report, officially called, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” was a paper published in 1965 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would go on to become a U.S. senator.

“At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family,” Moynihan said in the report.

According to Moynihan, an increasing number of single-mother, welfare-dependent homes and the matriarchal design of Black families diminished the male’s authority, one sign of a crumbling family structure. He predicted that “so long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.”

Despite criticism of the report as racist and unfounded, Norton said Moynihan was “prescient.”

Rates of incarceration, drug use and trade, high school dropouts, teenage pregnancy, poor health outcomes and other social ills have increased, it seems, with the breakdown of Black families.

Statistics show that in 2008 only 34 percent of Black children lived in homes with two married parents and 3.7 million Black children live in single-mother homes with mothers who have never been married, more than any other demographic.

“If you think the Black nation can survive whole if only Black women are raising their children, I want you to show me how ,” Norton said. ...

The proliferation of incarcerated and unemployed Black men are among the reasons for the paucity of partners. ...

District resident Alphonso Coles said young people have to be counseled and prepared for marriage and parenthood. “Crucial conversations are needed before sex, before marriage and after marriage,” he said.

Girls must be trained to assess their partners wisely and to look beyond the outer trappings of wealth, beauty and possessions in choosing a mate.

“Is he kind to you, does he make you smile—those are far better questions,” Perrault said, adding that like first lady Michelle Obama, women must be willing to nurture the potential in their partner. “Ten years this woman was the [main] breadwinner…I was touched by Michelle’s ability to look at his [Barack’s] trajectory rather than his current circumstances.”

Labels: Barack Obama, culture, DC, Marriage, men, motherhood, poverty, race

posted by Eve at 11:44 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Will Major League Baseball teams be able to recognize gender-specific holidays, such as Mother's Day? Some teams may decide to forgo promotions that recognize the holiday in light of a lawsuit against the Oakland Athletics.

The A's just lost a $510,000 suit that alleged the club discriminated against men by giving away reversible bucket hats and tote bags only to adult women who attended the game on Mother's Day of 2004, according to The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog.

The plaintiff's lawyer, Alfred Rava, has filed about 40 anti-male discrimination suits in the past, according to the Journal. Aside from the suit against Oakland, the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim have also been served in recent years for holding similar promotions.

Labels: discrimination law, gender differences, motherhood

posted by Eve at 2:57 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A pregnant mother will have to give birth to another couple's baby after a blunder by an IVF clinic.

Carolyn Savage had the wrong embryos implanted into her and will have to give the boy up to his biological parents as soon as he is born.

Yesterday Mrs Savage, 40, who was expecting her fourth child with husband Sean, said: 'The hardest part is going to be the delivery. I remember communicating with the [unnamed] mother of this child as to what I was envisioning and hoping for." ...

The couple decided not to have an abortion because of their religious beliefs, and have met the other couple and arranged a handover.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, motherhood, pregnancy, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 2:36 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

I DIDN'T plan on seeing my birth mother again. I had already had the dramatic face-to-face reunion. I knew where she lived, understood the broad strokes of her family history, the details of my birth and the secrets she kept from her other children, including my existence. Yet after a couple of years of clandestine contact, she decided our relationship could not work, we parted ways, and in the eight years since I have done my best to accept her choice. ...

Our airport meeting was strained by awkward pauses and unasked questions. Still, I thought there were signs our relationship would work. She took me to her house nearby, introduced me to her husband while her children were away and told me family stories. When I left, she said she would write a letter soon. I had faith we would figure it out.

It took six weeks for that letter to arrive, during which I screamed, cried and swore her off. I had a thousand conversations with her in my mind about the past. By the time I got her kind note about how great I had turned out, I was way ahead of her. Real time was not fast enough to keep up with all I had lost.

Her subsequent letters came at slower intervals: three, then six, then nine months apart. She wrote about pedestrian matters like cleaning her basement and sports rivalries. I described the cherry blossoms in Prospect Park, interspersed with questions she did not want to answer.

Inevitably, our relationship crumbled, piece by unspoken piece. The last letter I got was months after my daughter was born, when she sent an outfit with the kind of obligatory card of congratulations one might receive from a great-aunt. Its last two lines read: "My husband does not think it is good for our family to tell our children about you. Know that I pray for you and your daughter every day."

I was furious. But as I tried to make sense of her choice to walk away again, I knew, holding my own infant daughter, about the fierce love and fear that molds mothers. I knew she loved her children, wanted to protect them from the facts of her life before they were born: how as a young woman she had gotten pregnant by a man twice her age, how her parents had arranged for her to go to another city, where she signed the papers for my adoption hours after labor, and then returned home, leaving me when I was 5 days old.

How was she to tell them that after I was born she erased that part of herself completely? As a mother I understood this struggle even as it pained me. She had only told one other person, her husband, in the 40 years since it happened.

Yet as my finger hovered over the Facebook search button that night, I fantasized that this history could be overcome. I thought if only she were to see my profile, my passion for hula-hooping, my joy in eating coffee fudge ice cream every Friday afternoon with my daughter -- her granddaughter -- she might change her mind.

Labels: adoption, motherhood

posted by Eve at 3:59 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Many DoubleX readers seem incensed by Katie Roiphe’s story, "My Newborn is Like a Narcotic." But Roiphe is absolutely right that the intense love between mothers and newborns is a very neglected subject in both literature and philosophy and yes, also feminist writing. (Compare it to the enormous literature on the profundity of sexual and erotic love.) So it might be helpful to see what the science has to say about Katie’s experience, and to think about what the science means.

I write about this at length in my new book, The Philosophical Baby. In short, the scientific literature shows that the mechanisms behind our love of babies is remarkably similar to the mechanisms involved in sexual love. There are clear hormonal and chemical changes that come with pregnancy, labor, and birth, which affect the way we feel, just as there are with sex. In natural labor and the period following, the body produces large amounts of both oxytocin and endorphins (in fact, they use oxytocin to induce labor). It’s too simple to call oxytocin the “bonding” chemical, but there is a lot of evidence that it plays a role in close attachment, trust, and love. If you give people a whiff of oxytocin they’re more likely to cooperate in a game. Endorphins are the natural chemicals that are mimicked by drugs like opium and morphine. (I remember thinking as I held my own first newborn and the flood of warmth and happiness overcame me, “Gee, if this is what opium is like, I’m sure glad I never tried it.”)

Labels: children, culture, motherhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 5:40 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...When the baby was four weeks old, I had to do a reading at Barnes and Noble. I had written the introduction to Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife, and I was scheduled to do a reading with Talese. On the night of the reading, I left the baby with someone I trust completely and absolutely. I managed to put on a dress and look something like the person who gave readings who I used to be. But when I walked out onto the street, I felt like I was missing a limb. Even though Talese was riveting by any objective standard, my concentration faltered. During the reading I thought about the baby. As people asked questions, I calculated how long the taxi ride home would take. Afterward, there were people who wanted to buy one of my books. The manager of the bookstore held out a pen, and I apologized and told him that I couldn’t sign books, that I had to run home. The manager looked a little bewildered. This was, after all, a book signing at which the authors traditionally sign books.

On the escalator I panicked slightly because the person in front of me wasn’t moving, and I couldn’t pass her to get out of the store quickly enough. During the taxi ride down the FDR highway, I looked out at the water and cried. It was insane, sentimental, out of proportion, and I was aware that it was insane, sentimental, and out of proportion. But only when the baby was back in my arms did I feel OK again.

I remember visiting one of my closest friends on her maternity leave last summer. We sat on a wooden bench in her garden and drank iced coffees, and gazed at her second baby. She is a writer, and we talked about how the women writers we most admired had no children, or have had one child, at the absolute most, but never two. (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen had no children; Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, and Janet Malcolm all had one.) My friend looked down at her newborn and her tiny eyelashes. She could entertain this conversation in an academic way, but as she adjusted the baby's hat I could see how far removed it was from anything that mattered to her. Here, sitting in the garden, looking at the eyelashes, would you trade the baby for the possibility of writing The House of Mirth? You would not.

People often compare having a new baby to the early days of a love affair, which is true as far as it goes, but one’s physical fixation on, and craving for, a newborn is much stronger and more intense that that. How often in a love affair can you literally find yourself in tears because you were away from a man for three hours?

Labels: children, culture, motherhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 5:34 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

If you Google the phrase "America's worst mom," the first hit is Lenore Skenazy '81, who in 2008 let her nine-year-old son, Izzy, take the subway in Manhattan by himself. Skenazy wrote about the decision in her column for the New York Sun -- and then found herself on the Today show, parrying criticism from a clinical psychologist. After she let Izzy ride the Long Island Rail Road alone this year -- and a conductor who noticed him called the police -- she drew on the experiences for a book about her parenting philosophy. Emily Bazelon '93, '00JD, an editor at the web magazines Slate and DoubleX, interviewed Skenazy.

Y: Why did you call your book Free-Range Kids?

S: We are so consumed with making sure kids are safe that we are keeping them cooped up like chickens. We're preventing them from enjoying their lives. Of course, people ask me what a free-range kid tastes like. ...

Y: One reason parents are loath to take small risks with their children, I think, is that when a child gets hurt, the assumption is that the parents are to blame.

S: Yes, yes, the guilt and the blame! The child of a friend of mine broke her arm on a swing. Other parents asked, "Why weren't you there?" In fact, my friend was pushing her daughter on the swing. Her child fell because sometimes bad things just happen, and it's no one's fault. But we don't believe in accidents anymore.

Labels: childhood, culture, motherhood, parenting

posted by Eve at 12:18 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Wendy Duren thought she did everything right.

She broke off relationships with men who didn't want to settle down. She refused to get pregnant out of wedlock. She prayed for a child.

Duren's yearning for motherhood was so palpable that her former fiancé once offered to father a child with her. But he warned her that he wasn't ready for marriage.

"I get bored in relationships after a couple of years," he told her, she recalls.

Those events could have caused some women to give up their dreams of motherhood. But Duren, a pharmaceutical saleswoman, didn't need a man to be a mom. At 37 years old, she decided to adopt. ...

Marriage and motherhood -- it's the dream that begins in childhood for many women. Yet more African-American women are deciding to adopt instead of waiting for a husband, says Mardie Caldwell, founder of Lifetime Adoption, an adoption referral and support group in Penn Valley, California.

"We're seeing more and more single African-American women who are not finding men," Caldwell says. "There's a lack of qualified black men to get into relationships with."

The numbers are grim. According to the 2006 U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, 45 percent of African-American women have never been married, compared with 23 percent of white women.

Yet the decision to adopt isn't just driven by the paucity of eligible African-American men, others say.

Toni Oliver, founder and CEO of Roots Adoption Agency in Atlanta, Georgia, says her agency sees more single African-American women adopting because of infertility issues. ...

Some single African-American women deal with another challenge: criticism for bringing another African-American child into a single-parent household.

Kaydra Fleming, a 37-year-old social worker in Arlington, Texas, is the mother of Zoey, an adopted eight-month-old girl whose biological mother was young and poor.

"Zoey was going to be born to a single black mother anyway," Fleming says. "At least she's being raised by a single black parent who was ready financially and emotionally to take care of her."

Yet there are some single African-American women who are not emotionally ready to adopt an African-American child who is too dark, some adoption agency officials say.

Fair-skinned or biracial children stand a better chance of being adopted by single black women than darker-skinned children, some adoption officials say.

"They'll say, 'I want a baby to look like a Snickers bar, not dark chocolate,' " Caldwell, founder of Lifetime Adoption, says about some prospective parents.

"I had a family who turned a baby down because it was too dark," she says. "They said the baby wouldn't look good in family photographs."

Labels: adoption, motherhood, parenting, race, single parenting

posted by Eve at 9:40 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Single mothers moving out of public assistance, and low-income families searching for affordable child care, will applaud the $4 billion increase in stimulus funds for programs like Head Start, Early Head Start, and Child Care Development Block Grants, which support state programs for subsidized care. But it's far from certain whether the children who actually receive these services will be better off, and that's Penelope Leach's particular concern.

This British child development expert, the best-selling author of Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five, has earned an international reputation for helping readers consider their offspring's point of view on matters like infant sleep disturbances and potty training. This new volume also offers a child-centered perspective, but Leach has moved out of the nursery and stands ready to make her mark on an entrenched ideological debate that asks whether nonmaternal child care helps or harms young children.

Actually, she thinks that's the wrong question to initiate a discussion on a contentious subject. Readers must first consider, she says, "what kind of care, where, by whom, for which children, from what age, for what hours, paid for by whom, and with what results?" ...

Still, she wants readers to come to grips with an unpleasant truth: Much of American day care is just plain "bad." Given the available options, infants in particular are better off at home with their mother, a family member, or a nanny. Working mothers of very young children express greater satisfaction with in-home care, in part because caregiver/infant ratios remain too high in most affordable group programs. That problem can delay the developmental milestones of underprivileged children already at risk because of family instability.

This is especially relevant for American families. About 12 percent of three-month-olds here are placed in day care, and another 24 percent are in family day care, where small groups of children are cared for in private homes. Though British child care practices track most closely with our own, fewer than one percent of three-month-olds attend day care in Great Britain, and just one percent are brought to family day care. Comparisons between American and other Western European practices are even more striking.

Labels: day care, family policy, motherhood, parenting, poverty

posted by Eve at 9:29 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Rosin’s right, I think, to object to the unrealistic or overbearing attitudes that many breastfeeding advocates take to the subject: there’s no excuse for overstating or misrepresenting the science, and mothers who find nursing to be a burden should absolutely not feel guilt-ridden if they slip off to the store for formula or rice cereal. But the idea that the experience of having friends and physicians pressure a woman into breastfeeding and then make her feel tremendously guilty about the thought of stopping or cutting back is anywhere near the cultural norm even among Atlantic readers or the rest of the American overclasses seems quite unrealistic to me. It’s true that we need to find an appropriate middle ground, and that accomplishing that is going to require honesty about the benefits and burdens of whatever decisions mothers, fathers, and children choose to make. And no one should deny that perspectives like Rosin’s can play important roles in helping us to do these things. She’d be able to do that much more effectively, though, if she didn’t minimize the very different sets of challenges faced by mothers and children in circumstances different from her own.

Labels: culture, motherhood

posted by Eve at 9:17 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...The role reversal caused by men's job losses is one byproduct of the economic downturn that has many news outlets, if not outright cheering, at least tentatively applauding. In her online column for Forbes, Elisabeth Eaves likened stay-at-home mothers re-entering the workforce to more-permanent Rosie the Riveters, commenting, "thanks to the recession, we may be at just such another socio-sexual inflection point." New York Times contributor Lisa Belkin wondered if women might finally become the majority of American workers, suggesting that such a development would be a "silver lining" in these dark times. One Salon writer celebrated the possibility that the "long-awaited redistribution of domestic labor might prove crucial in finally evening the professional playing field," while another wondered whether the financial crisis could turn out to be "accidentally feminist."

It isn't just the media promoting the idea that increasing numbers of mothers putting in more hours in paid work represents progress for women. Left-leaning think tanks, as well as the Obama administration, are also undertaking efforts to further the trend the recession began. In mid-April, the Center for American Progress announced that it is teaming with the University of Southern California and Time Magazine to explore the impact the recession has had on women. While acknowledging that being the family breadwinner may be a burden to some mothers, Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the center and project co-editor, said that it can also be "an opportunity." On April 22 she informed Congress that the rising unemployment of men has provided many working moms much-needed domestic help.

That may seem a rather callous perspective to out-of-work men, but Ms. Boushey's take is perfectly appropriate to "A Woman's Nation," a venture that John Podesta, the CEO of the Center for American Progress, promises will consider "the central question of the role government, business, and faith organizations, as well as individual women and men should play in supporting women's role now in the workforce…. " Given how many of the center's former employees work for the Obama administration, it's little surprise how closely the project dovetails with a March 11 executive order forming a White House Council on Women and Girls that aims to increase women's employment in various male-dominated industries.

There's only one problem with all these efforts to support mom in her new financial-provider role, and Ms. Hemmert presents a stark picture of it. However empowered the media, the think tanks and the White House tell her she should be, she is profoundly unhappy to have changed places with her spouse. "I don't like coming home and seeing him in my apron," Ms. Hemmert says while watching her husband make dinner. She reacts with outright revulsion to the phrase "Mr. Mom," and her mouth hardens into a thin line when her husband explains that it isn't necessarily a man's job to earn a living for his family, that a man can also be "the person who handles children and sets up play dates."

Ms. Hemmert admits that she sees her own parental job as something separate and different from her husband's, and she not only resents him for usurping her role but has lost some respect for him. "I'm a woman, and I want to be a mother first," she states simply.

To be fair, many women who found themselves in Ms. Hemmert's position wouldn't experience the same level of displeasure and disappointment in their husbands that she expresses. But research indicates that most do share her desire to be a mother first and an earner second. And they, too, prefer a husband who's more interested in bringing home the bacon than in cooking it.

Labels: economics, family policy, gender differences, motherhood

posted by Imapp Staff at 5:38 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT