Ironically, we did a far better job of caring for new mothers in the past than we do in modern-day America. In colonial times, women were expected to stay in bed for a minimum of three to four weeks to recuperate, rest, and bond with their babies during what was known as the “lying-in” period. Some version of the lie-in still exists across many parts of Europe, and in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In China, standard practice is thirty days of restful confinement, plus another week if a woman has had a C-section. In Mexico, it is forty days, or long enough for the womb to return to its place. Women in Bali are not allowed to enter the kitchen until the baby’s umbilical cord stump has fallen off. Hospital stays after childbirth are a week in France and other European countries, compared to 24 to 48 hours in the United States.
In their book The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels assign the reader a powerful mental exercise in which we are to imagine that when we drop our toddler off at day care, we also drop off our clothes that need laundering or mending, and we ask for our toddler’s vaccinations to be administered by the on-site medical staff. When we return at day’s end to pick her up, we also pick up a healthy fresh dinner prepared by chefs on-site, and a few armfuls of groceries we ordered at drop-off time. What working mother would not relish such a scenario, in which she is spared time in the kitchen and trips to the pediatrician and grocery store? What a fabulous fantasy!
The shocking moment for the reader occurs when she realizes that in 1945 America, this was not a fantasy. These multipurpose centers were implemented to support mothers who, because of the war, were forced to work outside the home. And did I mention that these government-funded childcare centers were highly affordable, if not free? What happened when all the men returned from the war, and working outside the home became a choice (and one that was generally frowned upon) rather than a mandate for mothers? The centers vanished.
What does it say that as a nation, we were doing a better job in 1945 of supporting working mothers than we are today? Evidently, when the concept of women working outside the home was new, it was easier to recognize the hardships inherent in such an arrangement. Public policy reflected that. How could women possibly manage all the tasks of rearing the children, feeding the children, and holding down the fort if they were also working in the factory from nine to five? Clearly, such a feat could only be accomplished with a little help, financial and practical. Today, it is the norm for women to go on working, or even to start working (to earn additional income for their growing families), after bearing a child. In this not-so-new normal, there is so little recognition at the policy level of how incredibly difficult this balancing act is that at the individual level, working mothers often don’t know why they are struggling so much. They think, Why am I so exhausted? Why is my fuse so short?
If we look at parental-leave policies, the story becomes even more bleak. As scholars Carmen Knudson-Martin and Anne Rankin Mahoney write in their book Couples, Gender, and Power,
U.S. public policies designed to protect mothers and help equalize some of the pressures on women created by their child-bearing capacity lag dramatically behind other high-income countries and even behind many middle- and low-income countries. Out of 173 countries studied, 168 offer guaranteed paid leave to women in connection with childbirth, over half of which offered 14 or more weeks. In contrast, the U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act, enacted in 1993 and heralded as a major piece of legislation designed to help families, guarantees 12 weeks unpaid leave for family needs. Many family members find it irrelevant because they cannot afford to take it.6
Parental leave for fathers is fraught in its own ways. Only about 14 percent of companies offer paid leave to fathers, and even when paid policies are formally offered, unspoken social norms still heavily influence a new father’s choices about how much time to take off work. Writes Claire Cain Miller in the 2014 New York Times article “Paternity Leave: The Rewards and the Remaining Stigma,” “The challenge . . . is not just persuading employers to offer paternity leave but also persuading men to take it.” One study found that while 89 percent of fathers took some time off after their baby’s birth, nearly two-thirds of them took less than a week.7 Every father in my circle of friends, including the one to whom I am married, remained engaged to some degree in work even during that all-too-brief period of staying home right after the baby’s birth, whether taking phone calls, answering emails, or even trying to meet deadlines on projects. Men fear the consequences of putting out any signals that their families are more important than their work, even temporarily. Recent studies indicate that just as there is a “motherhood penalty” for women in the labor force—meaning that women who take time off for mothering reduce their earnings potential for the life of their careers—men who take time off to fulfill family responsibilities also suffer negative financial consequences greater than when they take time off for other reasons.8 The message is clear: as a society, we do not condone paternity leave, and when fathers exercise their right to it, the professional and financial repercussions are not insignificant. These findings become all the more disturbing when juxtaposed with research demonstrating exactly how beneficial paternity leave is to the child, the couple, and the family.
For instance, we know from research that a father’s involvement in the care of the baby is of paramount importance to the couple’s well-being across the transition to parenthood. It is also a major predictor of a mother’s well-being in particular. Even her chances of becoming depressed in the first year after birth are reduced when her mate takes leave from work.9 One study found that longer paternity leaves are associated with greater father involvement nine months after the leave occurred.10 While you might assume that fathers who are more inclined to be involved with their children in the first place are the ones opting to take longer leaves, this study actually controlled for that. So, from a statistical standpoint, it is accurate to say that the longer leave generates greater long-term father involvement.
Fathers who take leave to care for their infants, especially when they do so upon the mother’s return to work, actually describe feeling grateful for having had the opportunity to learn what soothes their babies. Recent neuroscience research reveals that for fathers, the neural pathways that promote optimal caregiving get forged by repeated daily action.11 In mothers, the brain changes that facilitate nurturance and bonding are more primitive and automatic, prompted by the neurochemical changes triggered in pregnancy, labor, and lactation. But it is through ongoing, consistent involvement in the care of their babies across time that fathers’ brains become wired for better attunement and caregiving. And yet the stigma against fathers taking more than the tiniest leave from work impedes that ongoing, consistent involvement.
When a father is less involved with care early on, the mother’s greater expertise at soothing the baby and reading the baby’s signals paves the way for problematic patterns and dynamics. The seeds of resentment and imbalance are sown every time a baby’s cries are heard only by Mom, or soothed more quickly by Mom than by Dad. There are basic behavioral principles governing the process in the short term; if Mom’s tools (her touch, her voice, her breast, her special way of swaddling, her special way of rocking) work better than Dad’s to quickly end the aversive stimulus of baby’s cries, of course everyone will prefer that Mom swoop in and do her thing. In the long term, however, the benefits of this swooping in are far surpassed by the costs. Dad is more likely to feel inept as a parent compared to Mom, and Mom is more likely to resent Dad not only for his ineptitude but also for the lesser burden this ensures him. The bond between baby and father is likely to be weaker, and as we will discuss in chapter 7, Dad is more likely to feel displaced and threatened by Mom’s strong connection with the baby.
Although it’s incredibly difficult to do in the moment, it’s important for new parents to make here-and-now choices with long-term ideals in mind. It might take Dad longer to soothe his cryi
ng baby, but it’s important that he has opportunities to do so. When both parents want to go get some exercise on a Saturday morning, it might be easier for Dad to be the one to go to the gym because the baby might get hungry and might not take a bottle, but what’s needed is a creative solution that allows both grown-ups to get their needs met. It might cost the family more money if Dad takes parental leave, but that might be income extremely well “spent” if it is viewed as a kind of insurance policy against developing gendered power imbalances in the relationship, and the marital dissatisfaction that comes with them. As Liza Mundy wrote in a 2013 article in The Atlantic,12 paternity leave is “a brilliant and ambitious form of social engineering: a behavior-modification tool that has been shown to boost male participation in the household, enhance female participation in the labor force, and promote gender equity in both domains.” With the far majority of mothers of young children working outside the home, the call for men to contribute more within the home and as parents simply cannot go unanswered.
It Takes a Village, but Where Have All the Villages Gone?
I have no memories of ever having been cared for by a babysitter or childcare professional when I was a child. No teenage girl, no college-age nanny, no day care provider. Growing up, this did not strike me as unusual, if I even noticed it at all. But after I had my first child, I began to marvel at the fact that vast amounts of our income were being devoted to paying others to take care of our son, whereas for my own parents, my existence on the planet seemed not to require anything of the sort. I asked my mother whether my memory was accurate. She confirmed that it was true, and it was true despite the fact that she and my father both had full-time jobs (at least once my brother and I were beyond our toddler years), and despite the fact that they performed in a country rock band at weddings, bars, and county fairs nearly every weekend and sometimes on weeknights during the majority of my early childhood. There was no need to hire a babysitter because my maternal grandparents lived a mile and a half down the road, and my paternal grandparents lived about fifteen minutes away. They were fixtures in my life, extensions of my parents who provided nearly as much love, food, discipline, and influence as my parents did.
In contrast, my children’s grandparents live three thousand miles away. My sons see most members of their extended family once or twice a year, with the exception of my mom, who uses all her vacation time and all her frequent-flier miles to come stay with us and soak up her grandchildren. When my boys look back on their very early years, they will remember their day care providers and preschool teachers—not their grandparents—as the influential caretakers in their early lives besides me and their dad. When our kids were really little, if ever my husband and I indulged our perpetual craving for a night out alone, it came at one of two costs: an uncomfortable feeling of indebtedness to one of the small handful of good friends we occasionally, reluctantly asked to take our kids off our hands, or a hefty check written out to the babysitter. Most of our peers with small children are in the same boat, far away from their own parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles.
The phenomenon of families scattering geographically is an undeniable one. Couples are embarking on the parenthood journey in an increasingly insular environment, and the potential negative consequences of this, especially for the marriage itself and the well-being of the spouses within it, have been largely overlooked. As psychologist Susan Pinker writes in her bestselling 2014 book The Village Effect, “Given that the only person many Americans say they can trust is their spouse, it turns out that many of us are just one person away from having no one at all.”13
When we place all our trust and dependency eggs in one basket, we create a precarious situation. Though you might expect that the responsibility of guarding a basket of this weight motivates spouses to handle it with greater care, the more likely scenario is that the pressure, fear, and vigilance of being its sole caretaker will wreak havoc on the relationship. If I’ve got only my husband to carry me through a hard time, and he drops me (so to speak), it’s devastating. So I’m watching him carefully, scanning his face for signs that he’s growing weary, and I’m checking myself constantly, trying not to be too heavy. This would be a delicate enough situation, difficult enough to sustain, if he were fully resourced and fortified for the journey. But he’s also having a hard time. The new baby creates a strain for him, too, and without an extended support system nearby, chances are the only person he can lean on is me.
In The Village Effect, Pinker details the benefits of face-to-face interaction for our health and happiness. Studies show that engaging with our fellow humans in person—not online, through texts, or over the phone—confers an array of benefits. Those benefits include, to name just a few, slower growth of cancerous tumors, longer lives, stronger learning in children, better mental health, a greater capacity for joy, and—of special significance for new mothers who need so much to feel seen and understood and validated—increased empathy. Even a serious introvert like me cannot deny the evidence that we are better off when we engage with others than when we keep to ourselves. I’ll admit it: I’m a person who sometimes looks the other way when I see someone I know at the store, and I’ve been known to wait in the car while picking my kid up from baseball practice so I don’t have to make small talk with other parents. I’d love to justify these choices by citing data that it’s only the deeply meaningful, intimate dialogue with close friends and loved ones that matters for our well-being, but I can’t. Instead there is overwhelming evidence that encounters with other people in our social circle—even those on the outer borders of that circle—provide not just momentary boosts in well-being but significant long-term health benefits. This means that even if we are raising our children without nearby kin, and even if our closest friends are unavailable, we stand to gain quite a lot just by getting out of the house. Both our health and our immediate well-being and mood will likely get a boost from a walk to the coffee shop or a trip to the library for toddler story time with other parents.
Pinker’s book sounds an alarm about the outrageous amount of time we spend on screens, staring at blue light and words and images instead of into the eyes of a flesh-and-blood person. We learn from Pinker’s assemblage of research data that emails and texts and online chat rooms are no substitute for spending time in the presence of others. There are echoes of Robert Putnam’s warnings fourteen years earlier—well before smartphones became a way of life and an endemic source of social disconnection—in his influential book Bowling Alone. Even then, he informed us, “There has been a general decline in social participation over the past twenty-five years, [and in] this same period [we have] witnessed a significant decline in self-reported health, despite tremendous gains in medical diagnosis and treatment. Of course, by many objective measures, including life expectancy, Americans are healthier than ever before, but these self-reports indicate that we are feeling worse.”14
Both of these important books remind us of one very robust research finding: for our health, happiness, and life satisfaction, the breadth and depth of our social connections are of vital importance. This is true for anyone—male or female, young or old—but it has a direct bearing on women’s well-being in the transition to motherhood. In what Pinker calls “the female effect,” research suggests that the majority of social support so vital to women’s well-being comes from their female friends and family members. Pinker points out that making contact with other women releases oxytocin, a hormone often dubbed the “bonding hormone” because we secrete it during orgasm, childbirth, breastfeeding, and caregiving. But oxytocin doesn’t just make us feel connected and fond of each other; it also counters stress and actually makes us physically healthier. Pinker states, “Oxytocin surges through your bloodstream, damping down pain and inflammation, making you feel good in the here and now, and ultimately increasing your chance of survival.”15
Studies also show that female-female relationships are characterized by the greatest degree of what researchers call “commun
al responsiveness”: the sense of inherent responsibility one person feels for another’s well-being and the willingness to attend to that person’s needs with no strings attached.16 This means that two women, whether friends, a mother-daughter dyad, sisters, or a same-sex couple, are likely to care for each other in a way that is arguably deeper and more consistent than any dyad involving a male. This may seem counterintuitive—the notion that reciprocal caring is, or at least should be, greatest in our committed romantic partnerships is a widespread one—but it is consistent with abundant research demonstrating that men reap more health benefits from marriage than women do, and that husbands report feeling understood and affirmed by their spouses far more than wives do.17
This is just a glimpse into some of the quite compelling research about the unique benefits women can provide to one another, and it brings into focus how much we stand to gain by turning to one another during the transition to parenthood (and during any tough time). But too often, we rely primarily or even exclusively on our (usually male) partners, and we are far removed from our mothers, mothers-in-law, and sisters. Even our neighbors and nearby friends are more likely to send a text that says, “How r u?” than to appear at the door with arms outstretched for a hug, eyes that convey compassion and interest, and maybe a bottle of wine or a casserole in hand.
To Have and to Hold Page 11