When it comes to the question of whether to reveal a donor’s identity to a child, at least for now, we leave the decisions to parents. Other nations say that prerogative is trumped by a person’s right to know his heritage: Britain, for example, recently banned anonymous donation; any children conceived after 2005 will have access once they turn eighteen to identifying details about their sperm or egg donors. Since 2000, when the debate over this issue began, the number of registered egg donors in Britain has dropped almost 25 percent.
Yet egg donors and recipients may have less to fear from open donations than they imagine, at least if the experience is comparable to sperm donation. According to Joanna Scheib’s research, teens who were conceived with “open-identity” sperm—who when they turn eighteen can have access to their donor’s name—said that, while more than 80 percent were interested in meeting their donors, fewer than 7 percent wanted to establish a father-child relationship with them.
A few days after my conversation with Marie, I talked to Becky. She had just found out she was pregnant with twins. “Twins!” she crowed. She had always hoped to have two children: both she and Russell are close to their siblings. Now she was jubilant, if jittery. “When I found out, I walked around in a haze for a week thinking, What have I done?” she said, laughing. “As for the donor piece, I imagine this could make it easier. They won’t be alone in their situation. They’ll be in the same boat. I’m glad that they’ll be together and genetically related to each other.”
She paused a moment, thinking about her future. “I’m just happy,” she said. Finally, Becky would be a mother, her husband a father, the two of them building a family with all the conflict, joy, and unpredictability that entails—regardless of whose genes are involved.
Bringing Down Baby
It seems bizarre that we are still arguing over whether day care is good for children—don’t we have enough healthy, functioning adults who went through it?—as opposed to making absolutely sure that every child in it is getting the highest quality care. That such care can have a profound, even transformative effect is indisputable. The latest in a stack of longterm studies, this one published in 2017, followed children from birth until age thirty-five: it found that quality child care resulted in both mothers and children born into disadvantage leading more successful lives. Yet child care remains punishingly expensive, typically costing one-third of families’ income (the Department of Health and Human Services says that figure ought to be more like 7 percent). The study featured in this piece, which ran in April 2001, was seized upon as fodder for the era’s Mommy Wars, ratcheting up panic and guilt among working mothers while doing nothing to improve child care.
A 1950s-style attack demands a 1950s-style response, which is why a lot of working moms last week felt the need to duck and cover. The reaction was triggered by news reports that the largest and “most authoritative” study ever conducted on the effect of child care on development found that kids cared for by someone other than their mothers for more than thirty hours a week—that includes grandmothers, aunts, even fathers—are more likely to display behavioral problems in kindergarten. As one headline put it: “Day Care Kids Are Turning out ‘Smart and Nasty.’”
It turns out that it was just one researcher—Jay Belsky, a longtime foe of day care—who, to the dismay of many of his coauthors, cast the findings so negatively, even going so far as to suggest women adjust work schedules to avoid leaving their children with others. “If you want to reduce the probability of those outcomes, you reduce the time in care,” he advised. Spinning the Mommy Wars angle guaranteed that the study would land smack on the front pages of newspapers across the country. And it did, despite the fact that the findings were well-labeled as preliminary and that the study, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, draws no conclusions about whether day care is actually the culprit (or, for instance, whether the problem is stress imposed on parents by inflexible employers) or what the long-term implications might be. Also given short shrift was the news of day care’s positive effects, most notably that by age five children in high-quality care have superior language and memory skills compared with those who’ve stayed home.
But then, where day care is concerned we seem to revel in bad news. If the research had found children in nonmaternal care to be more obedient but less verbal, almost certainly the headlines would have read, “Day Care Kids Are Turning out ‘Dumb’ and ‘Passive.’” Doomsday scenarios, which strike at the heart of Americans’ deep anxiety about child care, sell even when they’re only based on a press release (the actual report is still unpublished).
A closer look reveals the statistics to be less alarming. Only 17 percent of children in day care showed “explosive,” “disobedient,” or “aggressive” tendencies, which means the other 83 percent did not. What’s more, the differences that do exist are well within the realm of normal—day care hardly breeds school shooters. And since 9 percent of children who stay home with Mom are also seen by their teachers as aggressive by kindergarten, the real differential is only 8 percent. No matter. You can bet that from now on every time a working mother’s child defies her or throws a public tantrum or sasses back at a teacher, other adults will shake their heads knowingly: “See, that’s what happens when a mother neglects her child.”
Of course, infinite variables affect a child’s well-being. Behavioral problems have been observed when family income drops or when mothers become depressed, a real vulnerability among those who stay home. According to psychologist Judith Wallerstein, divorce also causes long-term psychological damage to children. But we haven’t heard Belsky, himself a divorced dad, advising parents to stay in bad marriages. “I’m not self-serving,” he said when asked whether he wasn’t pushing mothers to sacrifice themselves in ways he wouldn’t personally accept. “I don’t read the literature differently because I’m divorced.”
Belsky, who volunteered to announce the study’s results to the press, infuriated his coauthors who feel he distorted their work. “These are little differences” in behavior, insists Alison Clarke-Stewart of UC Irvine. “If the results showed that 50 percent of children in child care were more aggressive, I would agree that’s something we need to be concerned about. But 17 percent is what the test predicts as normal in the general population.”
As Clarke-Stewart points out, many factors could account for the disparity. For instance, she says, mothers who stay home may be less aggressive than those who work and so tend to raise more docile kids. Also, their children’s measures of aggressiveness rise once they enter kindergarten. Maybe being tossed into an institutional setting with other kids naturally heightens those behaviors—as anyone who went to school recalls, it’s a blackboard jungle out there. If that’s the case, the differences may diminish or disappear in a year or two as children who’ve been home acclimate to the classroom. At any rate, Clarke-Stewart and other researchers on the study believe that further research is needed before reliable conclusions can be drawn.
Belsky isn’t buying it. “Listen, every one of these authors signed off on the dissemination of these findings,” he told me. “Are they saying something else now? People don’t like to be unpopular. I don’t like to be unpopular either, but I’m not going to say it ain’t so. It’s clearly so.”
So, the authors quibble. The media sensationalizes. Meanwhile, the true impact of all this hype, which places responsibility for children’s mental health solely on their mothers’ presence in infancy, will be an increase in something far more damaging to families than day care: working mothers’ guilt, which undermines parental confidence. It is pathetic, in the year 2001, to have to remind people that two incomes are necessary for basic survival in most families. Or that working fathers are never required to justify why they have to work. Or that even for the few women whose husbands do earn enough to support a family, economic independence protects a woman from divorce, death, downsizing, and depression. Or that earning her own income gives a woman
more power and equality within her marriage.
Nor are long-term studies of day care’s impact new. Many of the reports stretching back decades, both here and abroad, have found no detrimental effects on children’s emotional or intellectual development—in fact, quite the opposite. An ongoing study by the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, which has followed poor children since they were three (they’re now forty), found that those who were enrolled in high-quality preschool were more likely to graduate from high school and earn more money as adults and were less likely to bear children out of wedlock or be arrested. Two other longitudinal studies conducted in Sweden found that early entry into high-quality care correlated with better school performance and positive teacher ratings well into young adulthood. Even the previous findings of Belsky’s group, which were released in 1996, showed that if a child is in high-quality care, the key to a healthy bond is a mother’s sensitivity to her child, not her employment status.
Still, American parents worry. What if the findings bear out and there is an uptick in children’s collective cruelty? Should mothers stay home and, if so, which ones? Should we dismantle the welfare-to-work programs that aim to get poor mothers out of the house, forcing them to place their children in day care? Should young men be granted better educational and employment opportunities than women so that they can support stay-at-home wives? Should the government grant child-care subsidies? Should we extend maternity leaves to five years per child, then allow women to return to their jobs with no penalty in terms of advancement and salary? Or does the buck stop with blaming Mom?
Here’s a theory: in a society in which working mothers are still viewed with ambivalence, perhaps their guilt and anxiety—even their resentment—is absorbed by their children and manifested as aggression. If so, it’s not mothers’ withdrawal from the workforce that’s called for, but support, appreciation, and reassurance—by employers, friends, family, and, in particular, husbands. A 1999 survey of one thousand schoolchildren by Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute found that kids felt fine about the amount of time they spend with Mom whether or not she worked. But children in both camps were more likely to feel they have too little time with their dads. Did that provoke front-page headlines and national soul-searching about how men negotiate work-family balance? Not hardly.
Day care, which now serves thirteen million children, is here to stay. Working mothers are here to stay. In a potentially contracting economy, both will be increasingly indispensable. If anything is harmful to children, it’s the false debate over whether mothers should stay home: the real issues are how to ensure the ready, affordable availability of the high-quality child care that researchers know is effective—and all too rare in this country—as well as how to reform the workplace to allow for the healthiest possible family life. Focusing on these things would not only require being truly smart, it would also require being kind. The fact that we haven’t risen to that challenge is the real nasty truth.
Where I Got Daisy
My daughter is biracial—Asian Americans often call it “hapa”—which makes her part of one of the fastest-growing populations in this country. As a feminist, I know that issues of race, class, sexuality, disability, gender, and gender identity interplay and overlap. As a parent, I live my life at one of those intersections. This piece, which ran in May 2007, explores a little of what I’ve learned as the white mother of a child of color.
The first time it happened, I was on my maiden voyage with my four-month-old daughter, Daisy, flying alone with her to Minneapolis to show her off to my parents. I was sure I was prepared for the trip: my carry-on bulged with six changes of clothes, twenty diapers, an industrial-size box of wipes, a stack of baby books, three Whoozits, four puppets, two teddy bears, and her favorite bunny rattle. I’d nursed her on takeoff to ease the pressure in her ears and planned to do the same on descent. For a first-time mom, I thought, I was doing pretty well.
Then, while I was jogging in place in the galley trying to lull Daisy into a nap (and, as a side effect, working off the pregnancy weight), another passenger noticed us. “What a beautiful baby,” she cooed and, before I could even smile in acknowledgment, added, “Where did you get her?”
Let me be clear: adoption is a wonderful thing, a great gift to both parents and children. But Daisy is not adopted (though the question would be equally ill worded if she were). She simply inherited the golden skin, dark hair, and eyelid fold of my Japanese American husband, while I have blond ringlets, blue eyes, and a complexion the color of library paste.
“It’s a natural question,” my father said when I told him about it at the airport luggage carousel. “I mean, look at her. Look at you. People are just curious.” Maybe. But why did that curiosity leave me feeling sucker-punched?
Over the next year, what I’d come to call The Question became a regular feature of my life as a mother. It took a variety of forms: “What a beautiful baby. Is she from China or Korea?” “Oh, how cute. Where is she from?” Once even: “How old was she when you adopted her?” I began to anticipate the reaction, tensing up when strangers approached us or prying eyes stared at us too long. I noticed that I was more relaxed, friendlier, when we were out all together as a family and Daisy’s provenance was obvious.
I began to wonder: If I found the attention to our racial difference upsetting, how, someday, would she perceive it? And if I didn’t know how to respond to it, how would she? After all, she’ll probably spend a lifetime hearing, “Where are you from?” or “When were you adopted?” or “What are you?”
I’d often contemplated how to raise a daughter with a healthy sense of female identity, but I’d believed matters of race were my husband’s job—he, after all, was the person of color. I was wrong. For my child’s sake, and my own, I needed to understand what it meant to be a multicultural family in a world that doesn’t always see the shades of gray among the shades of brown. I needed to know how to answer The Question.
“Your dad is right, it is a natural question,” said Donna Jackson Nakazawa, mother of two multiracial children and author of Does Anybody Else Look Like Me? My heart sank. When Daisy was born, a friend sent me Nakazawa’s book, considered a kind of bible among parents in racially mixed families. I figured Nakazawa would be the perfect person to call for advice. Now I wasn’t so sure. Until she added, “It’s natural if you still think of people as only coming in five flavors: Caucasian, African American, Asian, Latino, and Native American. That’s what we all learned growing up. But that’s not how it is anymore.”
In fact, according to the 2000 census—the first to collect multiracial data—more than seven million people identify themselves as mixed race, and, so far, they come in fifty-seven different “flavors” (take that, Baskin-Robbins!). Their ranks include some of our most celebrated movie stars, recording artists, politicians, and sports heroes: Kate Beckinsale, Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Norah Jones, Tiger Woods, Apolo Ohno, Derek Jeter, and, of course, Barack Obama. Increasingly visible at universities, they’ve formed “Hapa Club”s (“hapa” is the Hawaiian term for a person of partial Asian or Pacific Islander heritage) at such schools as Brown, Columbia, UCLA, and Stanford. The upshot: when one includes transracial adoptive families, there is an unprecedented number of white parents of children of color. Parents like me.
I’ve often thought that there is nothing that makes a man a feminist faster than becoming the father of a daughter. I suspect a similar dynamic is at work here. I’d certainly witnessed the small, corrosive slights my husband, Steven, faced in his daily life, but they didn’t cut me as deeply as they did him. Early in my pregnancy, though, a park ranger stopped to chat with him while we were hiking up Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California. “Where are you from?” he asked. “Berkeley,” Steven answered. “No, I mean where are your parents from?” the ranger responded. “Los Angeles,” Steven said, less amiably this time. The ranger acted as if Steven were simply being willful. “Okay, so you don’t want to tell me.” Ste
ven glared at him a moment. “I did tell you,” he said, then stalked away.
Imagining my unborn child navigating that exchange hit me right in the belly. “What gets to you is the everyday ignorance,” Steven would tell me later. “It’s being constantly made to feel like the ‘other.’”
That was it. That was exactly what bothered me about The Question. It was a reminder, even when offered under the guise of a compliment, of my daughter’s “otherness,” of our mutual “otherness.”
“Understanding where those comments come from is the first step,” Nakazawa advised me. “But next, you have to be clear about your goal. And the goal is: you don’t want that track to start in Daisy’s head every time there’s an incident—the one that says, ‘I’m different, I’m different, I’m different, and people don’t think she’s my mom.’ You want to be a buffer for her. You want to make sure that she knows what’s wrong is out there in the world, not inside of her.”
Great, I thought. So how do I do that? Of course, the process starts at home. We’ve always talked proudly to Daisy about her joint cultural background and have a tonal rainbow of Groovy Girls as well as a slew of baby face books that feature lots of mixed-race kids. Nakazawa suggested that as Daisy grows older we pull out a map and discuss how people from all over the world migrate to this country; by the time she’s eight or nine, we could even talk about the African origin of the human species.
Don't Call Me Princess Page 23