COMMENTARY–April 11, 2002

Monday Morning

A couple of weeks ago, I read through the April 2002 issue of Oprah Winfrey’s magazine as my kids took their piano lessons. I forgot to bring a book with me, so I leafed through the magazine and came across an article written by journalist Mary McNamara, who writes for the Los Angeles Times. She wrote an article about how she looks forward to Monday mornings when she returns to work outside the home and puts her two young children in daycare.

Ms. McNamara is the mother of a girl and a boy, ages one and three, and she works outside the home full-time. In her article, she is candid about her need to take a break from the hard work of mothering her two young children. She writes that she needs to repeat things to her kids often before they listen to her. She makes it sound as if all children are demanding creatures who cannot or will not listen to their parents.

Of course, Ms. McNamara could not just write her complaints about her children without expressing her deep love for them. She would not want to be accused (as no woman does) of being a mother who does not care about her children. She also knows that her article will trouble some readers. She even advises readers not to bother sending in letters if they tell her something to the effect that she shouldn’t have had kids if she doesn’t want to care for them.

Ms. McNamara, like many women writers who complain about mothering and its demands, emphasizes that she dearly loves her children. She cites the difficulty of separating from her young children in the evenings and on weekends since they spend so much time in day care. At the same time, she does not want to be around them for too long.

She describes, for example, how she and her husband recently spent an enjoyable weekend alone and without the kids. Ms. McNamara apparently enjoyed her weekend getaway very much, but she again mentions her attachment to her children. She returned home an hour earlier than scheduled on a Sunday evening just to spend some time with them. Yet she emphasizes that she still looked forward to returning to work the next morning, a Monday morning.

It is doubtful that many readers will be bothered by Ms. McNamara’s article because it is generally accepted that most women with young children are in the workforce. It has become the norm for women to work outside the home while they leave their children in some form of day care or in-home care with a nanny or relative.

This is all understandable in light of many women’s unwillingness to abandon their careers, their need to help pay sizeable monthly mortgage payments, their wish to assure their financial security in case of accidental death of a spouse or divorce, their desire for continued intellectual stimulation, and so forth. Despite understanding all this and without denying their importance, I think it is very crucial to clarify that Ms. McNamara creates a view of her children as if they live in their own world. In other words, she distinguishes the world of children as being one that is distinctly separate from that of their parents.

By putting young children into a world of their own, filled with their own language (or lack thereof) and neediness peculiar to their age, Ms. McNamara succeeds in doing what most everyone in our society does. Essentially, adults create a false dichotomy between the lives of parents and those of their children. From Ms. McNamara’s perspective, for example, her children are strictly in a world of their own, one that seems to exhaust her.

Undoubtedly, many women would agree with Ms. McNamara’s sentiments toward being around young children for extended periods of time. She writes that she, like many adults, would rather be around other adults who can talk to her intelligibly while she drinks from a cup of coffee without worrying whether or not a small child will cause her to spill her coffee.

Ms. McNamara enjoys the intellectual stimulation of being productive at work and surrounding herself with adults who are as motivated to work as she is. In her work world, there is no room for children because they do not belong at work with their parents.

For over a century, our society has created living conditions under which it is nearly impossible for most mothers to keep their young babies or toddlers with them while they try to generate income. Whereas a mother’s work was always associated with mothering children and helping to maintain the survival of a family, women can no longer do this without leaving the home and their children.

In the past, women carried their babies on their backs while they worked in fields, did household chores, maintained gardens and farms, and did a great deal of other work. Today, it is almost ludicrous to suggest that a woman should carry her baby while tending to work like litigating in court, operating in hospitals, or selling products because most income-generating work is situated outside the home.

There are clever women who have created income-generating work from their homes, but they face the reality of receiving relatively low pay and little prestige for doing their work. Effectively, our society makes it untenable for women to do the work of mothering and to generate income unless they work outside the home without their young children in tow.

The ultimate consequence of getting women to leave the home in order to generate income is to diminish the value of the work of mothering and homemaking. This is the case even though it would take a host of service providers to do the work of one woman in the home, which includes caring for young children, cleaning house, cooking, transporting children, entertaining children, and so forth.

Economists have estimated the cost of a mother’s work in the home to be anywhere from $35,000 to over $100,000 per year. Today, such figures are no longer daunting, and many families try to replace the work of mothers with other caretakers and service providers. For these families, a mother has the potential to earn much more than this amount.

Similarly, some fathers measure their time in terms of potential income and assess that they do not need to spend time at home because their time is too valuable. Consider, for example, an attorney who earns $400 per hour and who weighs the cost of spending an hour during the day with his or her child when a nanny can do this for less than $10. It is highly likely that the father will work longer and let the nanny spend an extra hour with that child.

Such comparisons, of course, fail to account for the priceless importance of human love, interaction, care, and touch that children deserve to experience with their parents. It is easy enough to calculate one’s worth in terms of income, but one’s care and love are immeasurable. As men have been doing for a long time, however, more and more women are weighing the value of their mothering efforts against that of the income and prestige they can generate by working outside the home.

In 1989, for instance, I knew a busy obstetrician who had given birth to her second child. At first, she eagerly anticipated keeping the baby in a nursery next to her office under the care of a nanny. The arrangement lasted only a few days. The baby was unhappy at the office, and the mother was distressed by the baby’s cries as she worked full-time.

She told me that the baby was happier at home with the nanny. He was only six weeks old. Clearly, the obstetrician tried to do the work of mothering her baby, but it was impossible when she had a set of objectives to meet: she needed to pay the rent on her new office space, retain her patients and attract new patients, and produce income to support her lifestyle. Work outside the home is now often incompatible with the work of mothering.

In the meantime, the obstetrician felt assured that her baby was receiving good care. Intriguingly, she had the same confidence in her older child’s care. Sadly, he was diagnosed with a congenital hearing deficit that was not detected by an excellent pediatrician during his regular check-ups. It is possible that had the obstetrician stayed home with her older child, she would have detected that something was amiss with her child’s hearing.

This obstetrician, however, is typical of many professionals who need to work outside the home and are unable to keep their children nearby. The work of mothering and employment outside the home are often in conflict. The precedence is usually the maintenance of career and income while the care of young children is relegated to others.

In terms of economics, the work of being a mother at home differs distinctly from the work that she may do to earn an income outside the home. Offering no pay and little respect, the work of mothering is expected but neither appreciated nor respected. Since economics dominates much of how and what we think, the general idea that the work of mothering was once integral to the survival of families has been supplanted by the assumption that child-rearing can be done by anyone other than mothers.

Day care workers and nannies are hired to do the work of mothering while mothers work outside the home to do the work that fulfills their ambitions and their need to earn an income. It has become normal that children are no longer reared in the bosom of family life under the care of loving mothers.

Feminists routinely debunk the idea that a child needs the constant comfort and succor of a loving mother. They decry maternal love and intuition as scientific myth. Instead, they lobby for more widespread access to day care centers and preschools. Proponents of day care believe that young children whose mothers work outside the home need access to decent day care centers that the federal government should ideally build and maintain.

Feminists assume that if the government spends enough money to provide regulated day care centers, then all problems would be solved for the many mothers of young children who work outside the home. Ultimately, feminists choose to glorify a mother’s need to work outside the home while expressly denying a child’s need for his or her mother’s care.

The basic assumption that many parents make today is that professional day care centers and schools can replace the care that mothers provide their young children. In her article, Ms. McNamara never once expresses doubt about her children’s day care experiences. For her, Monday mornings are the return to normalcy not only for her but also for her children because they return to day care.

It is not surprising that the institutionalization of children’s lives has been so taken for granted. Indeed, some parents are so convinced that their young babies need an edge over other children that they willingly send their babes to “school” in early infancy. In general, there is a prevalent and terribly misguided belief that the work of parents is replaceable.

We are, after all, living in what the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch called “the therapeutic state,” a society that is enthralled with professionals and experts. For several decades now, feminists have been the experts on women’s lives, and they have proclaimed loudly and clearly that women need to stay in the workforce. They support the notion that professional day care workers can offer young children care that is comparable or even better than that offered by loving and caring mothers.

Fathers in the Western world long ago set a precedent for delving into work life while frequently forsaking family life. Since this was done in the name of earning an income, it is not unreasonable that women in the workforce now are equally justified in forsaking family life for work life. Women today can leave behind their young children as easily as do their male counterparts.

In other words, women have successfully joined men in the quest to find a haven outside family life in work life. Where exactly, though, does this leave young children?

It irritates me that children are seen as creatures who live in their world of play and immaturity while adults live in their world of responsible maturity and commitment. The creation of such disparate worlds leaves young children in the hands of surrogate caregivers who may not necessarily be capable of loving them. Moreover, the young children are placed in the company of numerous other children exactly the same age.

Instead of growing and maturing in an environment that enables a young child to experiences the care of a loving parent, many are growing up in a herd under the supervision of low paid workers who might not even like children, let alone love them.

In addition, as wonderful as some day care centers are (although less than 15% of daycare centers are properly staffed and maintained to nurture young children), it is the purposeful segregation of children into peer-aged groups that is most worrisome.

It is already bad enough that millions of children are forced by law to attend school for a requisite twelve years. In some states, kindergarten, be the thirteenth year, is also mandatory. There are even supposed children’s advocates and politicians who are pushing for mandatory preschool attendance in order to train children to become better prepared for kindergarten.

In other words, children may be institutionalized at an even earlier age so that they might eventually succeed in the adult world. Meanwhile, young children are repeatedly segregated from the adult world and forced to spend their time in the organized world of play and learning. Ironically, while young children are segregated into their own world of play, it turns out that most children in day care and preschools are sorely lacking in imagination.

Forced to sit and to behave, many young children do not get to really play and use their imaginations at all. They learn, instead, how to behave so that there is order in the classroom and so that they get along with one another. The assumption here is that children learn to socialize in organized settings such as day care or preschool whereas the socialization a child learns in the home has little value.

I was always bewildered when parents explained why they sent their young children to preschool. The reason was always the same, which was for the young children to learn how to socialize. The falsehood of such a line of thinking lies in the frequency with which happy and well loved young children may be bullied or bored by participating in such organized, artificial settings.

My nephew was an only child when he was a toddler, and my sister lived far away from me and my children. At the time, she insisted on sending him to preschool. The result was disastrous. Another child hit my four-year-old nephew repeatedly, and the teacher responded by invoking the old rule of blaming the victim.

It was an ugly situation that my sister had never anticipated. She had placed her sensitive and sweet child into a harmful situation, and the teacher did not help her son. Instead, the woman blamed the little boy for being weak and inspiring the other boy to hit him.

It is the ultimate irony that the teachers to whom parents entrust the well-being of their beloved children will sometimes behave cruelly and unkindly to the children who most deserve affection and compassion. I am inclined to believe that these scenarios will become more and more frequent since young children are being institutionalized at an earlier age.

Children mature and develop into human beings by observing their surroundings and those who care for them. The mother-infant bond is not some mythical and nonsensical relationship, but one that deeply forges the healthy development of human beings. Parents ignore this fact by artificially segregating children into a realm of their own, be it in day care centers or preschools.

Children, especially when they are young, need to be around the adults who care for and love them. It is a universal truth that most young children need their mothers more than anyone else. Fewer young children, however, receive the benefit of being cared for and loved directly by their mothers since so many mothers are in the workforce. Similarly, few women enjoy the simple task of mothering since there is so much else to do.

I respect mothers of young children who want and need to work outside the home do their best to enjoy their work. I would caution, nevertheless, that it is disingenuous to glorify the certainty of living in one’s own adult world of work and productivity, as does Mary McNamara in her article.

Is it enough that women have entered the workforce en masse? Is this what womanhood is all about? Can it be that women are just like men, bound to the ethic of earning money and creating ever-higher standards of living? I do not think so.

I think that I would rather read about a woman who admits that there is a genuine struggle to have to work outside the home while leaving young children in the care of others. I know these women, and they want to be with their children. They do not look forward to Monday mornings because in their hearts, they are at one with their young children.

I think it is for these women that radical social changes should be made. For the many women who do not look forward to Monday mornings when they need to part from their young children, Christopher Lasch offers some remarkable words of wisdom. In the preface to his powerful book Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, he writes the following:

Feminists have not answered the argument that day care provides no substitute for the family. They have not answered the argument that indifference to the needs of the young has become one of the distinguishing characteristics of a society that lives for the moment….The problem of women’s work and women’s equality needs to be examined from a perspective more radical than any that has emerged from the feminist movement. It has to be seen as a special case of the general rule that work takes precedence over family. The most important indictment of the present organization of work is that it forces women to choose between their desire for economic self-sufficiency and the needs of her children. Instead of blaming the family for this state of affairs, we should blame the relentless demands of the job market itself. [1]

When I first read this passage, I was profoundly impressed by the clarity of Lasch’s thinking. Truly, there is nothing radical about leaving one’s children behind in day care while one revels in the comfort of living in the adult world of work. His comment also clarifies the deficiency in Ms. McNamara’s logic. What exactly is so wonderful about seeking the solace of life away from one’s children? As righteous as Ms. McNamara may feel, her sentiments are only rationalizations.

Young children are designed by nature to be highly dependent upon their caregivers, especially their mothers. Children grow up in the bosom of family life to become healthy and thinking adults.

Instead, children are now expected to mature along with their peers in organized day care and to understand that their lives are distinctly separate and apart from that of their parents. Children are to understand that their world is completely different from that of their parents. This is a false distinction that has been created by default. A child’s world is an integral part of his parents’ world, whether the latter will admit it or not.

Revised April 13, 2006

[1] Lasch, Christopher. 1977. Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. New York: W.W.Norton, xvi-xvii.


THE NURTURING MOTHER


COMMENTARY–April 11, 2002 Monday Morning A couple of weeks ago, I read through the April 2002 issue of Oprah Winfrey’s magazine as my kids took their piano lessons. I forgot to bring a book with me, so I leafed through the magazine and came across an article written by journalist Mary McNamara, who writes for the Los Angeles Times. She wrote an article about how she looks forward to Monday mornings when she returns to work outside the home and puts her two young children in daycare. Ms. McNamara is the mother of a girl and a boy, ages one and three, and she works outside the home full-time. In her article, she is candid about her need to take a break from the hard work of mothering her two young children. She writes that she needs to repeat things to her kids often before they listen to her. She makes it sound as if all children are demanding creatures who cannot or will not listen to their parents. Of course, Ms. McNamara could not just write her complaints about her children without expressing her deep love for them. She would not want to be accused (as no woman does) of being a mother who does not care about her children. She also knows that her article will trouble some readers. She even advises readers not to bother sending in letters if they tell her something to the effect that she shouldn’t have had kids if she doesn’t want to care for them. Ms. McNamara, like many women writers who complain about mothering and its demands, emphasizes that she dearly loves her children. She cites the difficulty of separating from her young children in the evenings and on weekends since they spend so much time in day care. At the same time, she does not want to be around them for too long. She describes, for example, how she and her husband recently spent an enjoyable weekend alone and without the kids. Ms. McNamara apparently enjoyed her weekend getaway very much, but she again mentions her attachment to her children. She returned home an hour earlier than scheduled on a Sunday evening just to spend some time with them. Yet she emphasizes that she still looked forward to returning to work the next morning, a Monday morning. It is doubtful that many readers will be bothered by Ms. McNamara’s article because it is generally accepted that most women with young children are in the workforce. It has become the norm for women to work outside the home while they leave their children in some form of day care or in-home care with a nanny or relative. This is all understandable in light of many women’s unwillingness to abandon their careers, their need to help pay sizeable monthly mortgage payments, their wish to assure their financial security in case of accidental death of a spouse or divorce, their desire for continued intellectual stimulation, and so forth. Despite understanding all this and without denying their importance, I think it is very crucial to clarify that Ms. McNamara creates a view of her children as if they live in their own world. In other words, she distinguishes the world of children as being one that is distinctly separate from that of their parents. By putting young children into a world of their own, filled with their own language (or lack thereof) and neediness peculiar to their age, Ms. McNamara succeeds in doing what most everyone in our society does. Essentially, adults create a false dichotomy between the lives of parents and those of their children. From Ms. McNamara’s perspective, for example, her children are strictly in a world of their own, one that seems to exhaust her. Undoubtedly, many women would agree with Ms. McNamara’s sentiments toward being around young children for extended periods of time. She writes that she, like many adults, would rather be around other adults who can talk to her intelligibly while she drinks from a cup of coffee without worrying whether or not a small child will cause her to spill her coffee. Ms. McNamara enjoys the intellectual stimulation of being productive at work and surrounding herself with adults who are as motivated to work as she is. In her work world, there is no room for children because they do not belong at work with their parents. For over a century, our society has created living conditions under which it is nearly impossible for most mothers to keep their young babies or toddlers with them while they try to generate income. Whereas a mother’s work was always associated with mothering children and helping to maintain the survival of a family, women can no longer do this without leaving the home and their children. In the past, women carried their babies on their backs while they worked in fields, did household chores, maintained gardens and farms, and did a great deal of other work. Today, it is almost ludicrous to suggest that a woman should carry her baby while tending to work like litigating in court, operating in hospitals, or selling products because most income-generating work is situated outside the home. There are clever women who have created income-generating work from their homes, but they face the reality of receiving relatively low pay and little prestige for doing their work. Effectively, our society makes it untenable for women to do the work of mothering and to generate income unless they work outside the home without their young children in tow. The ultimate consequence of getting women to leave the home in order to generate income is to diminish the value of the work of mothering and homemaking. This is the case even though it would take a host of service providers to do the work of one woman in the home, which includes caring for young children, cleaning house, cooking, transporting children, entertaining children, and so forth. Economists have estimated the cost of a mother’s work in the home to be anywhere from $35,000 to over $100,000 per year. Today, such figures are no longer daunting, and many families try to replace the work of mothers with other caretakers and service providers. For these families, a mother has the potential to earn much more than this amount. Similarly, some fathers measure their time in terms of potential income and assess that they do not need to spend time at home because their time is too valuable. Consider, for example, an attorney who earns $400 per hour and who weighs the cost of spending an hour during the day with his or her child when a nanny can do this for less than $10. It is highly likely that the father will work longer and let the nanny spend an extra hour with that child. Such comparisons, of course, fail to account for the priceless importance of human love, interaction, care, and touch that children deserve to experience with their parents. It is easy enough to calculate one’s worth in terms of income, but one’s care and love are immeasurable. As men have been doing for a long time, however, more and more women are weighing the value of their mothering efforts against that of the income and prestige they can generate by working outside the home. In 1989, for instance, I knew a busy obstetrician who had given birth to her second child. At first, she eagerly anticipated keeping the baby in a nursery next to her office under the care of a nanny. The arrangement lasted only a few days. The baby was unhappy at the office, and the mother was distressed by the baby’s cries as she worked full-time. She told me that the baby was happier at home with the nanny. He was only six weeks old. Clearly, the obstetrician tried to do the work of mothering her baby, but it was impossible when she had a set of objectives to meet: she needed to pay the rent on her new office space, retain her patients and attract new patients, and produce income to support her lifestyle. Work outside the home is now often incompatible with the work of mothering. In the meantime, the obstetrician felt assured that her baby was receiving good care. Intriguingly, she had the same confidence in her older child’s care. Sadly, he was diagnosed with a congenital hearing deficit that was not detected by an excellent pediatrician during his regular check-ups. It is possible that had the obstetrician stayed home with her older child, she would have detected that something was amiss with her child’s hearing. This obstetrician, however, is typical of many professionals who need to work outside the home and are unable to keep their children nearby. The work of mothering and employment outside the home are often in conflict. The precedence is usually the maintenance of career and income while the care of young children is relegated to others. In terms of economics, the work of being a mother at home differs distinctly from the work that she may do to earn an income outside the home. Offering no pay and little respect, the work of mothering is expected but neither appreciated nor respected. Since economics dominates much of how and what we think, the general idea that the work of mothering was once integral to the survival of families has been supplanted by the assumption that child-rearing can be done by anyone other than mothers. Day care workers and nannies are hired to do the work of mothering while mothers work outside the home to do the work that fulfills their ambitions and their need to earn an income. It has become normal that children are no longer reared in the bosom of family life under the care of loving mothers. Feminists routinely debunk the idea that a child needs the constant comfort and succor of a loving mother. They decry maternal love and intuition as scientific myth. Instead, they lobby for more widespread access to day care centers and preschools. Proponents of day care believe that young children whose mothers work outside the home need access to decent day care centers that the federal government should ideally build and maintain. Feminists assume that if the government spends enough money to provide regulated day care centers, then all problems would be solved for the many mothers of young children who work outside the home. Ultimately, feminists choose to glorify a mother’s need to work outside the home while expressly denying a child’s need for his or her mother’s care. The basic assumption that many parents make today is that professional day care centers and schools can replace the care that mothers provide their young children. In her article, Ms. McNamara never once expresses doubt about her children’s day care experiences. For her, Monday mornings are the return to normalcy not only for her but also for her children because they return to day care. It is not surprising that the institutionalization of children’s lives has been so taken for granted. Indeed, some parents are so convinced that their young babies need an edge over other children that they willingly send their babes to “school” in early infancy. In general, there is a prevalent and terribly misguided belief that the work of parents is replaceable. We are, after all, living in what the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch called “the therapeutic state,” a society that is enthralled with professionals and experts. For several decades now, feminists have been the experts on women’s lives, and they have proclaimed loudly and clearly that women need to stay in the workforce. They support the notion that professional day care workers can offer young children care that is comparable or even better than that offered by loving and caring mothers. Fathers in the Western world long ago set a precedent for delving into work life while frequently forsaking family life. Since this was done in the name of earning an income, it is not unreasonable that women in the workforce now are equally justified in forsaking family life for work life. Women today can leave behind their young children as easily as do their male counterparts. In other words, women have successfully joined men in the quest to find a haven outside family life in work life. Where exactly, though, does this leave young children? It irritates me that children are seen as creatures who live in their world of play and immaturity while adults live in their world of responsible maturity and commitment. The creation of such disparate worlds leaves young children in the hands of surrogate caregivers who may not necessarily be capable of loving them. Moreover, the young children are placed in the company of numerous other children exactly the same age. Instead of growing and maturing in an environment that enables a young child to experiences the care of a loving parent, many are growing up in a herd under the supervision of low paid workers who might not even like children, let alone love them. In addition, as wonderful as some day care centers are (although less than 15% of daycare centers are properly staffed and maintained to nurture young children), it is the purposeful segregation of children into peer-aged groups that is most worrisome. It is already bad enough that millions of children are forced by law to attend school for a requisite twelve years. In some states, kindergarten, be the thirteenth year, is also mandatory. There are even supposed children’s advocates and politicians who are pushing for mandatory preschool attendance in order to train children to become better prepared for kindergarten. In other words, children may be institutionalized at an even earlier age so that they might eventually succeed in the adult world. Meanwhile, young children are repeatedly segregated from the adult world and forced to spend their time in the organized world of play and learning. Ironically, while young children are segregated into their own world of play, it turns out that most children in day care and preschools are sorely lacking in imagination. Forced to sit and to behave, many young children do not get to really play and use their imaginations at all. They learn, instead, how to behave so that there is order in the classroom and so that they get along with one another. The assumption here is that children learn to socialize in organized settings such as day care or preschool whereas the socialization a child learns in the home has little value. I was always bewildered when parents explained why they sent their young children to preschool. The reason was always the same, which was for the young children to learn how to socialize. The falsehood of such a line of thinking lies in the frequency with which happy and well loved young children may be bullied or bored by participating in such organized, artificial settings. My nephew was an only child when he was a toddler, and my sister lived far away from me and my children. At the time, she insisted on sending him to preschool. The result was disastrous. Another child hit my four-year-old nephew repeatedly, and the teacher responded by invoking the old rule of blaming the victim. It was an ugly situation that my sister had never anticipated. She had placed her sensitive and sweet child into a harmful situation, and the teacher did not help her son. Instead, the woman blamed the little boy for being weak and inspiring the other boy to hit him. It is the ultimate irony that the teachers to whom parents entrust the well-being of their beloved children will sometimes behave cruelly and unkindly to the children who most deserve affection and compassion. I am inclined to believe that these scenarios will become more and more frequent since young children are being institutionalized at an earlier age. Children mature and develop into human beings by observing their surroundings and those who care for them. The mother-infant bond is not some mythical and nonsensical relationship, but one that deeply forges the healthy development of human beings. Parents ignore this fact by artificially segregating children into a realm of their own, be it in day care centers or preschools. Children, especially when they are young, need to be around the adults who care for and love them. It is a universal truth that most young children need their mothers more than anyone else. Fewer young children, however, receive the benefit of being cared for and loved directly by their mothers since so many mothers are in the workforce. Similarly, few women enjoy the simple task of mothering since there is so much else to do. I respect mothers of young children who want and need to work outside the home do their best to enjoy their work. I would caution, nevertheless, that it is disingenuous to glorify the certainty of living in one’s own adult world of work and productivity, as does Mary McNamara in her article. Is it enough that women have entered the workforce en masse? Is this what womanhood is all about? Can it be that women are just like men, bound to the ethic of earning money and creating ever-higher standards of living? I do not think so. I think that I would rather read about a woman who admits that there is a genuine struggle to have to work outside the home while leaving young children in the care of others. I know these women, and they want to be with their children. They do not look forward to Monday mornings because in their hearts, they are at one with their young children. I think it is for these women that radical social changes should be made. For the many women who do not look forward to Monday mornings when they need to part from their young children, Christopher Lasch offers some remarkable words of wisdom. In the preface to his powerful book Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, he writes the following: Feminists have not answered the argument that day care provides no substitute for the family. They have not answered the argument that indifference to the needs of the young has become one of the distinguishing characteristics of a society that lives for the moment….The problem of women’s work and women’s equality needs to be examined from a perspective more radical than any that has emerged from the feminist movement. It has to be seen as a special case of the general rule that work takes precedence over family. The most important indictment of the present organization of work is that it forces women to choose between their desire for economic self-sufficiency and the needs of her children. Instead of blaming the family for this state of affairs, we should blame the relentless demands of the job market itself. [1] When I first read this passage, I was profoundly impressed by the clarity of Lasch’s thinking. Truly, there is nothing radical about leaving one’s children behind in day care while one revels in the comfort of living in the adult world of work. His comment also clarifies the deficiency in Ms. McNamara’s logic. What exactly is so wonderful about seeking the solace of life away from one’s children? As righteous as Ms. McNamara may feel, her sentiments are only rationalizations. Young children are designed by nature to be highly dependent upon their caregivers, especially their mothers. Children grow up in the bosom of family life to become healthy and thinking adults. Instead, children are now expected to mature along with their peers in organized day care and to understand that their lives are distinctly separate and apart from that of their parents. Children are to understand that their world is completely different from that of their parents. This is a false distinction that has been created by default. A child’s world is an integral part of his parents’ world, whether the latter will admit it or not. Revised April 13, 2006 [1] Lasch, Christopher. 1977. Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. New York: W.W.Norton, xvi-xvii.