WHY IT'S THE WAY IT IS:
THE PRIMARY PARENT
"Since pregnancy doesn't take 18 years, as does raising kids, perhaps the question needs to be, why should a woman have to choose to lose earning potential to raise a family and men don't?"
Women shouldn't have to "choose." And, I don't believe they actually do.
I don't think women cognitively plan or "choose to lose earning potential" so much as, once they have children, they prioritize their children in their lives. This priority conflicts with how the world is set up to fit men's standards as to how to work and earn.
If women routinely could do it all, simultaneously, and while maintaining a reasonable lifestyle, without the children having to sacrifice, and without killing themselves as superwoman, they would.
The question to me isn't why do women prioritize their children, but why don't men? I think biology is in there, at least *initially,* helping to set an entire subsequent course of events into action.
Women cannot avoid being the ones who have to take notice, slow down, drop back and take off time from work and life because of pregnancy. Post-partum recovery is not instantaneous; and breastfeeding frequently continues for months. Even if women *don't* take off from work more than the absolute minimum, this does not mean that they will be able to function up to par from late pregnancy through months afterward. This is a minimum, and doesn't include possible pregnancy disability or complications, none of which can be foreseen, and which are not at all rare.
Additionally, most families who have any children, have more than one child, so this "slight" interruption repeats itself one, two or more times.
Finally, it's simply not in the best interests of babies to be continually separated from their primary attachment (caregiver) who will be, most of the time the mother, simply from the standpoint of biology and the fact that the other parent usually cannot *also* stay home for the first months and years.
Why do mothers "choose" to take *any* time off from work? They do it because that is what their babies need, and because most (not all, but MOST) mothers of babies and very young children, under a few years of age, crave being with them and overseeing their welfare directly in ways that most fathers Just Do Not.
They may do it after that "recovery period," in whole or by cutting down, again because that is what a child, by now strongly attached to the mother as primary, *needs* for optimum development. It starts out as a biological connection through pregnancy/hormonal differences post birth, including where applicable, breastfeeding. Socialization and expectations are a *factor,* but not the whole of it.
But what happens because of biology in the very early months sets in motion a different kind of attachment of the infant to the mother that, while it *will* shift as the child ages, still requires an amount of effort to overcome and hurry along over to the father. It's an effort that is pragmatically unreasonable to expect from most people. It's not just a coin toss, absent the question of who earns more, as to which parent will be the one to whom the baby, then small child has primary bonds.
"The issue isn't the bearing of children; it is what happens after they come out, and the mother recovers."
Birth? When's that end? Do you think the two bodies involved, mother's and infant's, suddenly forget nine months of attachment as soon as an umbilical cord is cut? There's no instant separation there. Birth is a process.
Following delivery, a rather traumatic first upheaval in the infant's life, the baby optimally needs to reassert a very secure attachment with one caregiver. Usually, that will be the natural mother, because right after birth, she's the one who is most attached herself to the baby, and the one who has the hormonal urges to hold the baby and breastfeed it.
It's not a question of arbitrary choice, it's NATURE. It's natural. It's the way it is. You're looking actually to buck biology to expect most mothers who have just given birth to prefer to hand over their babies to someone else!
The post-partum bonding period is not just a question of a medical recovery, although that alone -- having to be the one who takes off from work and stays home the first months to recuperate and is with the infant the most -- adds even more to the usual outcome. That aside, there is just no denying how strongly most mothers of newborn infants feel compared with the fathers.
Notwithstanding the social pratter, post-birth, to most new mothers, if they were to be honest, it's THEIR baby. Has been their baby in their very body for nine months, and that certainly hasn't changed following the *additional* unilateral effort, investment and exertion she puts into the outcome of labor, delivery and post-post-partum lifestyle changes. These feelings don't usually manifest negatively (cf post-partum depression!) toward the father's beliefs that he's equally a parent, simply because he's usually the person the mother loves most dearly, the person who has been the most help and support to her, and the person toward whom she feels most generous. (Compare when that is *not* the case.)
If men felt as strongly as women about their babies, however, we'd be hearing about the abusive ones beating up on women who didn't let them do the bulk of the baby holding and care at least as often as we hear of the violent ones who go berserk over relationship jealousy, or because she didn't cook dinner the way he wanted it.
Women *do* get, to varying degrees, but usually, really strong maternal hormones and feelings about their babies (that change over time as the child grows), and men's feelings are *different.* Not the same, and not as strong, and because their bonding with the baby only first starts at birth, it's behind what the mother already has, and for a time, the gap also widens.
I don't believe we should set out ideals about what women "should" feel or want to do that most women aren't going to be able to live up to. Women shouldn't have to become and function and feel "just like a man" in order to optimize their lives in this world.
We make a huge mistake to tell women that an experience as huge as pregnancy is "irrelevant" and nothing much, because it's not.
And certainly, we are only setting the stage for mothers who find themselves dearly attached to their infants, milk letting down, etc. to feel bad about themselves, as if they are doing something wrong, or something's wrong with them that they feel so strongly about their babies, rather than going right back out to work. (In fact, these are the *best* kinds of parents that a newborn infant can have!)
It's not "controlling" or "stupid" or "gatekeeping" or "choosing not to work" or "being forced not to work" (notwithstanding that that historically *has* played a role), or any other negative.
That's not affirming of women at all, but denigrating of women, their unique biology, their different experiences and lives.
It's one thing to say "this is what women can do if they want to," and quite another to tell women (yet again) how they should feel, what they should do, and what their reproductive lives are about. OR, that if they simply function as women, as mothers, as it may feel natural to them, they have made some kind of stupid or selfish or shortsighted choices for which the penalty is economic subservience for the remainder of their lives.
"If women *choose*, in the first place, men who would be in a position to change their career expectations, then when the time comes for *raising the children*, the men would be the ones doing more of it."
I'm not so sure at all that it's a given that, just because a man makes less money, he will suddenly put the child's needs before his own and become a nurturer. And I'm not sure at all that what kind of feelings and desires a person will have, what kind of parent they will be -- man OR woman -- once they have a baby, is predictable by another person or even knowable by the very person in question about themselves!
The criteria for being an optimum nurturer and parent isn't based on some kind of inability or lack of motivation or desire to earn or do other things. There is no connection here that ipso facto the spouse who can't earn as much or achieve as much or more doing other things is the best choice for primary parent. It just doesn't work that way.
To assume that the *sole* or substantial reason that women are usually the ones who stay home with the children is because of lesser abilities in other spheres is also denigrating of women and their feelings about their children.
Women aren't getting stuck with the "scut work" of housekeeping or the child care (the two go largely together -- it's nesting) because they're less competent than the father to do other things.
They aren't choosing to do the child care because they are the frivolous ones who don't want to work hard or do something "serious" in the outer world. And they are not prioritizing their children, either, out of some acknowledgement that they, as between the parents, are the less capable, smart, or ambitious in other respects.
Prospective respective earnings as between the two parents is just *one* factor affecting all of this.
What a newborn baby needs is a *mommy.* Many men, regardless of their wage-earning ability or lack thereof, simply will not do this, simply will not nurture in the same way. They are very different with babies and around babies, exceptions noted. It's not just a difference of kind or degree of caregiving, but also a difference in motivation and desire. When that baby cries and a mother's milk lets down, along with a panicky kind of urgency to get to that baby immediately, there is just no claiming that men feel or behave the same way. Most do not.
Lots of men also have told me that, while they loved their babies (in the sense of protectiveness and wonder and pride of possession), they didn't honestly *enjoy* being with them, certainly not for unending hours on end, until they were a few years old. That's just not how most mothers feel. Many women pre-children aren't that way either *until* those very real, actual hormones that are there, as well as pre-bonding for months during the pregnancy, *do* change their urges in this regard.
Even women who are not "baby crazy" usually feel very differently when it's *their* baby. This is not to be confused with the erroneous notions that once the child gets to be a couple, three years old, women don't start getting really bored with doing nothing else. Lots, most, perhaps, do. Also not to be confused with needing a break, time off, etc.
We make a real mistake setting up "solutions" that don't look at the realities of life. We make a huge mistake denying that any differences at all between the sexes exist, because to the extent they do, denying them means those differences will not have been addressed, which means no allowances for them will have been made, which means the solutions based on flawed predicates ultimately will fail.
It's quite one thing to understand that there will always be exceptions to any rule, to allow for the occasional exceptions, and for the individuality of individuals; it's quite another to preach that these exceptions themselves now "are" or "should be" the rule.
Additionally, if we take the punitive attitude toward strongly bonded mothers, a *good* thing for children (!) that they will have to suffer consequences down the road, how is it a solution to "decide" that fairness will be if half the men take this route?
If women "shouldn't" want to do it, why would men?
If the situation that currently stymies many women because they have children from optimizing their lives is wrong for them, it won't be any more right to make primary parenting a deed that just gets equal-opportunity unjust desserts.
"Pregnancy is mostly irrelevant, because though it takes time and can be an impact, it goes away, and the childrearing is there for 18 years if not more and is way more labor and time intensive than the carrying was in most pregancies."
Pregnancy is simply not "irrelevant."
Women are not merely containers, and then -- spit -- out comes a baby as to which the mother and father experience equal feelings and thoughts. Nix. Birth is a process. The baby may no longer be physically attached inside the woman, but remains attached for nurturing, emotional and psychological development. As Does The Mother!
Some medical literature has theorized that human infants, being the only ones among mammals that are nonambulatory at birth, and looking at other developmental factors, actually aren't "completely born" until about six months of age.
Not all mothers feel irresistably bonded, but many, probably most, do. I don't think I'm interested in working toward a world in which a strongly bonded parent, devoted to her children and prioritizing them, is considered pathological, underachieving or deserving of some booby prize.
Moreover, babies *need* that consistent, devoted caregiver.
It is only over a period of years, about three, as the child becomes ambulatory and social, that it can be said that the child actually has disengaged to the extent that the attachment is similar in strength to both parents and perhaps others. And then, of course, another child or two comes along.... the actual period of normal career interruption, or at least interference, can easily be a decade or more.
The interruption will remain there, whether or not the woman works the bulk of these years, even full time. It sneaks in in little subtle ways: inability to have the freedom to work certain hours, travel without extensive planning, "head" conflicts instead of single-minded concentration on work, sick children, during the day phone calls and scheduling, etc. This is a hard one to shift over to someone else, since it can't be easily "seen." It's psychological, and mental, it's the added thought-energy of the added responsibility, it's a subtle thing that starts when the child is born and is very difficult for someone else to take on "cold" and for the mother to give up "cold," that can't be done "in part" or shared because of the nature of it (at best it would be two persons duplicating the effort.)
*One* of the parents ideally should be with the child from the moment of birth, more or less continuously, for three years, and then gradually separating longer and longer thereafter for optimal emotional, physical and intellectual development of the child. *More* women than men will *always* be that parent because one parent alone is the one who must get pregnant, take off time to recuperate, and breastfeed, and because pregnancy and hormones also create a stronger natural bond from the git-go.
And once the pattern is set in motion in the very early stages, it's just not realistic to expect that most, or half, or even a large percentage of parents will make, or would even be able to make, the huge efforts required to alter the situation, or that it necessarily will be feasible to do so for them down the road. Some will, but not that many.
Even if there are very strong motivations for the father, he just won't feel the same way about the baby in the beginning (there are rare exceptions.) And unless the father also earns *considerably* less than the woman, there just won't be the strong enough economic motivators to overcome the psychological and biological ones. Just because factors can't be seen, doesn't mean they are not there and very real.
From a psychological standpoint, it would be reasonable to plan for a shift in caregiver from mother to father as the children age. However, because of the way our employment sectors and society currently are set up, by this time in the children's lives, the mother usually is so behind the father out of the starting gate, and he's so entrenched in his career, that economic factors will dictate that a switch in who is the primary caregiver, also cannot be reasonably expected to be the norm for most couples.
Also, once the children are in school and the child care needed is such that women have more time available to work, the primary parenting STILL continues in the double shift sense. Mothers by this time are in the "habit" of doing the child care thinking and having the head-trip responsibility, and it's near impossible to shift attitudes and thought processes of people absent tangible changes in their lives, and actions aiding the learning curve that go along with them.
That constant on-the-mind stuff is the result of learning -- after the mother has been the one to go for months while pregnant during which time she can never not be away from the child (and maybe multiple times), and then spends a period of time during which the children's whereabouts must be on her mind 24 hours a day, attitudes of initiative and responsibility toward the children's needs aren't going to be something one just "assigns" to this or that person suddenly and arbitrarily.
It is a learned thing, but it's learned because of inalterable factors that *are* biologically based. Yes men *could* do it, and yes some do, most often when something happens that removes the mother from the scene altogether. But even then, some men just shift the responsibility onto another woman.
liz
Staying alive: Evolution, culture and women's intra-sexual aggression
Anne Campbell
Psychology Department
Durham University
South Road Durham DH1 3LE
http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.campbell.html
a.c.campbell@durham.ac.uk"The large endocranial size of our species together with a narrowing of the birth canal caused by bipedalism meant that infants had to be born relatively immature with a correspondingly longer period of dependency (Foley 1996; Lancaster & Lancaster 1983; Peccei 1995).
"In all societies, woman take primary responsibility for infant care (Ember 1981) and though this is doubtless a product of lactation, it extends beyond weaning and continues with solid food provision by the mother (Lancaster & Lancaster 1983).
"The primary attachment by infants is to the mother rather than the father (Kotelchuck 1976) and infants show greater fear of strange males than of strange females (Greenberg, Hillman & Grice 1977).
"There are no known cultures where mothers voluntarily abandon their children at the rate at which fathers do (Browne 1995) and mothers experience greater grief than fathers at the loss of a child (Zeanah 1989). The mother is the principle carer and protector of the infant."
LIZNOTES TABLE OF CONTENTS | FATHERLESS CHILDREN STORIES | THE READING ROOM
THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE | WOMAN SUFFRAGE TIMELINE | THE LIZ LIBRARY ENTRANCE
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