Child-Rearing’s Equitable Middle Ground Is Elusive

A close friend of mine called from New York on Sunday to wish me a happy Mother’s Day--and to apologize.

She’d called about a week ago and made a casual remark that I didn’t even recall. She said she’d decided to temporarily withdraw from the job market because she didn’t want to leave her 2-year-old son “with strangers.”

Maybe I had taken offense, my friend said. (I had not.) She said other women friends of hers, working mothers in New York, resent such sentiments as these. They had let her know.

Earlier this month, I wrote a column about a survey of American pediatricians, mostly men, mostly fathers and mostly married to stay-at-home wives. Most of these male physicians thought women who worked might be imperiling their kids.

This annoyed me. I argued for a more equitable middle ground, with mothers and fathers taking more comparable roles in the raising of their children.

I wondered why nobody had thought to study the effects of working fathers on the kids. Mothers, it seems, are forever shouldering this responsibility and, when the time comes, taking the blame.

So maybe this is why mothers, today, seem to be on the defensive. This is the feeling I get, from readers’ letters, phone calls and from talks with my friends.

Mothers who stay at home say they feel belittled by those who don’t. Mothers in the workplace say they feel the pull of guilt from home. These are rough generalizations, to be sure, but within them lies truth.

“You are treading on very thin ice to print what you have, to advocate what you do, regarding our children,” Mary Ellen Adams, of Newport Beach, wrote me last week. “I don’t have to look far to see the effects on a child of a dual-income family, where the mother works outside of the home.

“I can look in our neighborhood, at the latchkey children. I can look at the declining literacy rate in the U.S. I can look at the declining morality in teen-agers. . . . Finally, I can see it in my own son, who though wonderfully bright and beautiful would be that much more bright and beautiful had I not been forced to work.”

But Steve Traut wrote me this from South Laguna: “Working mothers don’t hurt their children. Working parents who are unable to work effectively as a team to provide attention, support and love for their children, do. Surveys such as the one you referred to in your article miss the point.

“A truly meaningful survey would have examined whether or not children are hurt when men do the parenting, not whether children are hurt when women do not. The important factor in a child’s development is the amount of attention and love she receives in total from both parents.”

At the heart of this debate, I believe, is the evolving role of women--and in their wake, men--today.

The feminist revolution undermined the traditional family equation, but still, three decades later, an ideal alternative hasn’t yet been found. Men, women and their kids are exploring new ways to work things out. Traditional isn’t average any more.

We call this choice, magnanimously. And therein lie the traps.

Choice is personal. People always disagree. Beliefs are increasingly framed as right or wrong, in moral tones. Nobody can really argue, rationally, with that. Instead they scream.

Abortion, gun control, the death penalty, prayer in public schools--now add to the Rorschach test of where-do-you-stands the issue of women and their place.

Most of the graduating class at Wellesley College, women who are among this nation’s elite, said they would like Barbara Bush to address them at their commencement.

One hundred fifty others said in a petition that they most certainly would not. The dissenters said they were “outraged” with the choice, which, incidentally, was second behind novelist Alice Walker, who turned the seniors down.

Barbara Bush, the naysayers went on, had gained her recognition through the achievements of her husband, the President of the United States. She is a college dropout, herself. The protesters asked what kind of achievement was this. They suggested that Barbara Bush, wife and mother, had done something wrong.

This, not surprisingly, has hurt and angered many women. They too feel indicted for the same “crime.” That’s why feminist , to so many, is almost a dirty word.

I too see this in my letters and in the angry phone calls from women who accuse me of attempting to speak for them when I write about issues so close to the heart. I am not, nor would I ever presume.

I am a mother and a wife and I work outside the home. I am a feminist because I had the opportunity to choose. I think every woman should have the same right. We’ll never get there, however, by spewing vitriol at those on “the other side.”

Or as Joyce Thompson, a stay-at-home mom in Tustin, asks in a letter she wrote me last week: “Is this really the ‘90s?

“Are we going to have to debate equality of the sexes into the next century? Dads are capable of giving baths, planning and making meals, buying and washing clothes. Moms can change and recycle the oil, fertilize and mow the lawn, organize the garage.

“Do what you want to do, do what you’re best at, do as few chores as you can get away with. Do what works for your family, what makes you feel like you’re doing OK.

“Now, if only women could get paid as well as men . . . “

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.