Working Parents, Thriving Children

Family values, conservatives argue, means re-creating the era of the breadwinner father and the homemaker mother. Newt Gingrich says his definition of the term can be found in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post of the 1950s. A British pediatrician, Penelope Leach, argues that day care harms the mother-child bond and women shouldn’t work if they have young children. An antidivorce movement has resulted in bills in five states that would keep warring couples joined at the hip for the sake of the children.

Worry about the decline of the family is fodder for the media and political candidates. Headlines trumpet “facts” about the new American family: working mothers frazzled by guilt and too little time, their kids prime candidates for psychiatrists’ couches; hard-charging Yuppies spending so much time getting ahead that their kids get short shrift; fathers routinely neglecting or abandoning their children.

But before we rush to bring back the ‘50s, we’d best look at new evidence that shows family “decline” to be a myth and makes a strong case that trying to resurrect a family style long vanished can actually hurt families today.

A major new study of American parents who are employed full time paints a far from bleak picture. Three hundred full-time working couples followed over a three-year period scored high on standard indices of mental and physical health and showed their children as generally doing quite well.

The study was funded by a $1-million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and its findings argue that trying to go back to the family of the ‘50s will only create illness-producing stress for ‘90s families. This study and others debunk a series of myths about two-earner families:

Myth: Moving away from the breadwinner father/homemaker mom family model harms children and creates undue stress for parents.

Fact: The two-income couple is now the typical American family--66% of all couples. One striking finding was that these couples, even in tough times, were not facing significant stress-inducing worry over finances. While families with just one breadwinner could be plunged into economic chaos by the loss of a job, these couples had a safety net because of their dual incomes.

Myth: Parents who work full time are too busy to care properly for their kids.

Fact: Working parents spend as much time with their children as families where one partner is not employed, but they do it on the weekends and the evenings.

Myth: Today’s fathers can’t compare with the caring, wise dads of the “Father Knows Best” days.

Fact: Fathers in dual-earner couples spend much more time with their kids than fathers of the ‘50s did and spend as much time parenting school-age children as mothers do. The reality of the ‘50s was not that father knew best, but that he often wasn’t around very much.

Myth: Working women are frazzled and guilt-ridden and their children are in trouble.

Fact: For women, employment has paid off in heightened self-esteem and improved physical and mental health. Scores of studies over two decades show that employed women are healthier than homemakers, and the scare stories about working women haven’t come true. Paid work provides a buffer against depression and anxiety.

As for children, study after study shows no difference between children of working mothers and those of homemakers on any measure of child development. Research finds that working mothers and their children are securely attached; one recent major study found that even infant day care does not harm the mother-child bond.

Myth: Fathers should be “in charge” of the family.

Fact: A major source of stress among working couples is a gap in the perception of sex roles. If men expect that they will be living much like Ward and June Cleaver on the TV reruns, they are being set up for major stress and conflict. The man who can’t, or won’t, accept an independent, competent woman as a partner is in for a rocky marriage.

We need family values, but those values have to support working families. These include family-friendly corporate policies and affordable and widely available day care. Policies that glorify a vanished past and denigrate the parents of today will only make life harder for the families we should be trying to help.