Apu’s World

I’m not a parent myself, but all around me, friends seem to be having children and coping with the challenges of raising children, often in nuclear families, with very little outside support. So, while I haven’t yet gone through the diaper-changing and losing-sleep routine, I have seen enough of it to appreciate how hard a job it can be. Which is why, a lot of the time, this working mom versus stay-at-home mom debate doesn’t really make sense to me. Why point fingers when the task is intrinsically time consuming and every parent has to make the choices that work best for them?

This doesn’t of course mean that I am blind to the gendered nature of choices. The fact is that even when the child has moved beyond the breast-feeding stage, it is almost always mothers who will make compromises in their careers. There are many reasons for this - motherhood and childcare have traditionally been closely tied up, men’s roles as fathers are defined differently, women still tend to marry men who earn more than them etc etc etc. Much as it would be nice to see a more equitable distribution of roles, I don’t see the point in blaming individual cases or choices. For that equitable distribution to happen, there have to be more systemic changes including better day care and a more positive attitude to men taking off time from their careers at workplaces.

But, I’ve spoken about all that before, so thats not what this post is all about. Rather, this post is about the Myth of the Full-Time Mom, something triggered off by the recent, ridiculous speculation on whether the American Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, can hold down an important job while caring for her family. (Shefaly has a good post on it here). The underlying assumption seems to be that a good mom is someone who has only one role - she must be MOM, and nothing else. Somewhere, this view seems to be sanctified by tradition, that oh, mothers have always ‘devoted’ themselves in this manner. Such views are not hard to come by, in the Indian context as well.

I thought it’s worthwhile taking some time to debunk this myth and strip it of this respectability provided by an invented tradition. For starters, we are making some huge assumptions, by thinking that families in the olden days (when this devoted mother presumably existed) were in anyways similar to ours. If two children or even just one child, is the norm today - let’s not forget that before easy access to contraception, even 8 to 9 children was not so rare. In a family with 8 to 9 children, where elders would also need to be served and taken care of, and extended family would frequently visit - I bet it would be hard to find the mother who could provide minute by minute attention to any individual child.

I’m not implying that there was any less affection - simply that this notion of mothers catering to children every second, possibly didn’t exist, except as an idealised fantasy. If anything, parents (both mom and dad) provide much greater attention to children today, with more labour saving devices, fewer children and more money to go around. My understanding of earlier times is that children often just grew up on their own. There would always be some elders to keep an eye around, one of the advantages of living in a joint family, but that’s about it.

Secondly, this whole debate about the SAHM versus the working mom and who does a better job, and whose kids grow up better, completely misses the point that for a majority of women, working or not working has never been a choice. The Myth of the Full-Time Mom is a middle class myth, because it is only us middle and upper class women who can afford it! Mostly, women from poorer classes cannot afford to be full-time moms. This is not to say that their children benefit from it. If you go to a construction site, you’ll often see the women carrying heavy headloads while their children play in the dirtiest of surroundings, hands and feet coated with the dust from the site. But - they do the best they can, with what they’ve got. So, in a sense, middle and upper class families have the luxury of one person earning enough to support the family. They  can also decide that both parents would ‘like’ to go to work, if they can find other options such as a good maid or daycare (which they can afford) or a grandparent who’s willing to look after the child. If not, usually the mother stays home. Some luxuries may be sacrificed if her salary is not available, but the family is not ‘deprived’ in any real sense.

In a way, the SAHM is a private good, paid for by the relative affluence of the family. This doesn’t of course take away from her contribution - child rearing is a difficult and time consuming job which has to be done by someone, whether in-house or partially outsourced. The point of looking at things in this somewhat clinical manner is to try and drive home the fact that there is nothing inevitable about being a full-time mom. It is a choice driven by children’s needs, by circumstances, by affordability and by societal norms. Full-time parenting can happen when the circumstances are right for it; it won’t if the situation doesn’t allow for it. Let’s not buy into this myth of it being how things have always been done, how they should be done, or how it is the ‘natural’ thing to do.

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