What Mom Has Time to Waste on Foolish Debate?

The caller, a working mother, was feeling like silly putty, yanked in a zillion directions. Any advice on how she could better cope with the demands of home and office?

The KFI radio shrink would have none of it. Don’t ask me for help, she said. I stayed home when my kid was little. If you weren’t so selfish, she added, you’d do the same.

Slap!

Likewise, a free-lance writer, whose opinion piece ran in The Times on Mother’s Day, enumerated the sacrifices she has made to stay home with her children. She was at a loss to understand how women could “dump” their children in day care and return to work. The message: Moms who go back to work are no kind of moms at all.

Slap!

Stay-at-home moms have been on the receiving end of plenty of slaps themselves. But I was unsettled by the smug assumptions behind these recent jabs: That any woman who really loves her kids will stay home with them. That children who are cared for by someone other than their mothers will be damaged. That fathers are not important enough to be brought into the discussion.

Then I reminded myself: Though it rages, year after year, only fools engage in this tired old debate.

The reality is that more than half of U.S. mothers with children under 6 work outside the home, and it’s unlikely they’ll return to the hearth any time soon. Why they work outside the home--whether to put food on the table or pay for piano lessons--is nobody’s business.

The reality is that for every study proving day care damages babies, another proves that children who experience it gain an edge.

The reality is that children are far more likely to be abused at home than in day-care settings.

Rancor among women debases the issue and muddles what should be clear: A woman who chooses to stay home to raise her children has made the right decision. So has a woman who returns to work to put food on the table for her children. And so has a woman who chooses to return to work because her family can live more comfortably on two incomes.

Nothing is served by picking at a mother for going back to work when her child is 6 weeks old, when that is all the maternity leave she is allowed. Or because her supervisor may not hold her job open. Or because if she stays away for six months, she will end up earning substantially less than a man in the same job, even years down the road.

It’s time we stopped criticizing and started respecting each other’s choices. It’s time we turned our energies to fighting for social and economic policies that benefit children and strengthen families.

On the national scene, the new Family Leave Act--12 weeks of unpaid leave for birth, adoption or family emergency, required of companies with more than 50 employees--is a nice, if tepid, signal from the Clinton Administration that America is getting more family friendly.

Funding for Head Start will probably be increased. Who knows? Everyone may have health insurance . . . eventually.

While the country is taking some baby steps toward more child-friendly social policy, recession-wracked California--with its Republican Administration--is valiantly trying to take a few steps back. Naturally, the effort is in the name of saving money--preferably on the backs of the state’s poorest citizens.

Recently, Eloise Anderson, the director of the California Department of Social Services, has called for women receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children to go to work.

The rationale behind AFDC has always been to help children so women with children under 3 have not been expected to work. Anderson argues that such logic is outmoded. After all, she says, women who are not on welfare return to work when their children are infants. Why should welfare moms be “treated like little girls” and expected to stay home?

It’s an interesting approach: Dress up the sort of welfare reform (Prop. 165) that was rejected by voters last year in feminist garb and see if it sells.

Had Anderson also sounded a cry for safe, affordable child care (or even addressed the issue of where these women might find work that would pay more than baby-sitting would cost) her position might be more palatable.

Instead, she’s just another woman slapping women.

And that gets us nowhere.