Science / Medicine : Pressure on Working Moms Stirs Problems

Pressure on women to return to work soon after giving birth increases stress for new mothers and their infants and threatens to create emotional problems for both, according to a noted pediatrician.

Adding to the stress is a “critical” lack of adequate day care, said Dr. T. Berry Brazelton of the Harvard Medical School. He estimated that 50% of parents are forced to leave their children in places they do not trust.

“The United States has not been sensitive to families’ needs nor is it a child-oriented society,” Brazelton said last week in a paper prepared for a science writers’ conference sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

In the wake of the women’s movement, women who stay home with their children often have divided feelings about their roles as mothers, with many complaining of feelings of isolation, loneliness and anger, Brazelton said.

“Women at home are just as stressed as women in the work force,” he said.

Women who are forced to break too early from their infants as a result of the financial need to return to work are confronted with another, equally devasting pressure: the widely held belief, often unspoken, that a mother should be home with her children.

“Any parent that leaves a child goes through a grief reaction,” he said.

In self-defense, some parents become detached from their children “because it hurts so much to leave that child every day in day care,” he said.

The result is they deny both themselves and the babies the play activities and other contact needed to cement their relationship and promote healthy emotional development, he said.

He called on Congress to approve two bills. One would require employers to protect the jobs of men and women for up to 10 weeks of parental leave after a birth. The other would provide $2.5 billion to subsidize child care for poor and low-income families and to improve the quality of child care.

The legislation would provide “national recognition of the importance of the family,” he said.

“It might serve to heighten the emphasis on strong ties within the family at a time when the national trend toward divorce and instability of attachments is proving especially costly to our children,” he said.