Suniya Luthar, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Columbia University, is conducting interesting research into how women are coping in their roles as mothers. What kind of support do they experience from their mates and the culture at large, and how does that impact them?

So far, she says nearly 2500 women have filled out her online questionaire. She is going to continue collecting data through the summer of 2007, then post her results then.

Her goal? To "try and understand what motherhood means for contemporary women themselves — and not just because of implications for their children (as has been the norm in developmental research)."

Based on the fact that other studies have consistently found that women feel unsupported as mothers--and in fact, receive less support than virtually any other government in the industrialized world--I wouldn't be surprised if she found widespread discontentment and frustration. What I'd like to know is if fathers feel this same discontentment--and for the same reasons. Perhaps if this wasn't framed as a "mother" issue, but a "parents' issue" faced by men and women, we'd see more action.


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We don't need to read a study to know that corporate America has been cutting back on benefits for employees. And employer-subsidized, on site child care has always been an unusual benefit, offered by those few enlightened employeers looking to reach out to women.
But it still was sad to read a Boston Globe story about a company that is about to axe a day care center for employees.
I don't agree with the Globe writer's premise that the reason companies are pulling back on such benefits is because the baby boomer employees are no longer pushing for them (they're now concerned with aging parents and other issues). Younger parents, if anything, expect employers to be more accommodating of their work-family needs than baby boomers.
The reason why companies are pulling back on this benefit is the same reason they're pulling back on all benefits. To squeeze out more profits in an increasingly competitive, globalized economy.
Day care centers are hugely expensive to operate. And, they may be of dubious recruiting value, especially in an era when employers are slashing medical benefits and only offer minimal maternity leave. Still it does seem sad that these days, even progressive companies are not bothering to try to answer the child care dilemma for employees.
Hillary Clinton--supposedly still mulling a run for President (does anyone doubt she is going to do this?)---is starting to make the press circuit, arguing her book, It Takes A Village, is more relevant than ever. It will be interesting to see if she would make work-family issues--and government support---a centerpiece of her campaign and the public policy debate.

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A journalist friend just told me about a site called stats.org. An offshoot of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Media and Public Affairs, it is devoted to taking a hard look at how journalists use statistics.
Sources are constantly flinging statistics at us; too often we simply cite them in our stories, without taking a critical look. Case in point: A New York Times story about a new publich health campaign to convince women to breastfeed, which equated bottle feeding with smoking. The NYT story, while seeming to report objectively on this campaign, nonetheless reported uncritically claims that

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Why aren't there more women at the top? This has been a question that has been asked since the 1980s, when women were flooding the workforce. The New York Times tackles the subject again in a story today about Carol Bartz, former CEO of Autodesk.
What we'd been told for years was it was the "pipeline;" once more women entered corporate America, they'd eventually make their way to the top. But the numbers of women in top leadership positions hasn't budged much, despite the fact that there has been a steady flow of women graduating from professional schools. There are plenty of women at the bottom and middle of corporations....but very few at the top.
So what's the reason? Well, the Times goes to the same predictable sources (Korn Ferry, Bartz, and other women in their late 50s who made it to the top) and comes up with the usual: Discrimination from the old boys' club. The writer doesn't actually utter that word--glass ceiling--but it's the same explanation.
Here's the problem with that: Many women are leaving because the workplace--particularly at the top--is still based on the assumption that you will have a mate at home, taking care of your personal life. They simply didn't want to make the same kinds of personal sacrifices that men have had to make to succeed in those positions. So they leave.
Does it mean women are less ambitious? Well, it means their ambitions are different.

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If you're wondering why it's so hard for mothers today, take a look at a new study by Brown University sociologist Susan E. Short, Ph.D.
Short and a team of researchers analyzed US Census data from 1880 to 2000 and found that mothers of young children have far less help from other women than ever before.

"The findings show that at the end of the 20th century, only about 20 percent of mothers with young children lived with another female who might help with housework and childcare, compared to nearly 50 percent in the late 19th century."

The researchers noted some obvious reasons for the decline: More daughters are attending school, and more of our mothers (and mothers-in-law) are working outside the home. (And I'd point out that fewer of us are living with or near our extended families, yet another down side to our increasingly mobile culture.)

Of course, this study didn't look at what kinds of contributions fathers are making. Research by Suzanne Bianchi, Ph.D., and others at the University of Maryland is showing that father are more involved in child-rearing and domestic tasks than they were a generation or two ago.

But women still are responsible for the bulk of domestic tasks, and without government supports or the built-in networks that women had a century ago, each of us is forced to cobble together our own patchwork of help. No easy task, as any mother will tell you. Stumble It!

In the last year, there have been a spate of stories about elementary schools banning tag and other "chase" games during recess. The schools say they are worried that kids could get hurt not only physically but also emotionally if one kid always is "it."

All of this just sounded silly, like the giving every kid a medal for "Good Citizenship" in my daughters' elementary school as a way of boosting self-esteem. (Note to well-meaning administrators: When everyone gets an award, the kids don't come home feeling good about themselves. They just shrug it off, as meaningless.)

But this week, I began to think that the banning of tag is part of a larger, more insidious trend: The fear of legal liability.

My kids' local elementary school has two playgrounds; one is being renovated. But for some reason, my daughter's kindergarten class was being forced to spend their recess in a tiny paved area behind the school.

Now, with all the research about childhood obesity and the need for kids, especially five year olds, to run around in order to be physically and intellectually fit, I thought surely the principal would want to remedy that.

Nope. He told me that the kids couldn't play in the other playground because it was made only for kids aged 8 and up, and he told me he was already dealing with one lawsuit filed by a kid who had fallen off some equipment four years ago. When I checked the sign at the playground, I learned that, in fact, the sign said it was for kids 5 and up. I told the principal.

He then told me, Well, we're only insured for kids age 8 and up.

Whether that's true or not (and I must say I have my doubts), it seemed obvious to me that what was going on was he was more concerned about the risk of being sued by a parent of a kindergartener...than he was about serving these kids' needs.

Pretty sad.
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The enormously popular social networking site, MySpace.com, announced that it will team up with an online background check company so that it can rid its site of convicted sex offenders.
After a spate of cases in which pedophiles molested and in some cases, murdered kids whom they had met on MySpace, the site has become a target of parents' ire. I've also heard of schools essentially banning kids from using the site. (The site insists that only those over 18 are allowed to use it, but many of the publicized crimes connected with site involved young teens.)
It is a brilliant p.r. move, and certainly is a good thing if MySpace's move scares some sex offenders off this site, but it shouldn't change the bottom line for parents. Wherever kids hang out, pedophiles will come. So kids--and that means teens too--need to be educated about basic Internet safety.
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Businessweek blogger Amy Dunkin writes about how cell phones have become a useful tool for the working parent. Certainly I don't know a single working parent who doesn't have a cell phone. In this post-9/11 era, I also think many of us view it as a matter of basic safety (although the scary reality is that on 9/11, most people got only sporadic cell phone service in Manhattan. A friend of mine drove to Newark at 1 a.m. looking for his wife because her last cell phone call to him broke up in Newark.)

What Dunkin doesn't address is whether kids should be equipped with cell phones. My kids don't have cell phones, though my 10-year-old is heavily lobbying for one. If I were working full time in New York City, I might consider giving her one, but I have heard a lot of very compelling reasons not to give kids their own cell phone. The biggest reason: Unlike a landline phone, we won't answer their phone (and hear who is calling them) and can be unaware of who they are chatting with and how much chatting they're do. It's the same reason why I won't let my kids have a computer in their bedroom. If the laptop is in the public spaces--living room, family room, kitchen--I can have a sense of how much time they're online and what they're doing there too.

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While I was busy at the New York Times Company Foundation conference (about which I will write more in the coming days), Sue Shellenbarger had an interesting column in The Wall Street Journal.
It seems that new data from the US Bureau of Labor is showing that more moms--at every income level--are taking time off from work to be with their kids. According to Shellenbarger, the data shows that women are staying out of the work force for one to three years, versus the longer breaks in the past.
Shellenbarger stresses that the women are returning to the workforce, and I'm sure the many feminist academics (who attacked the New York Times magazine's famous article on women "opting out" as reactionary and a distortion of the data) will chime in that the real message is that women aren't leaving permanently--just temporarily, like the European women do (although without the government support that European women get).
But I'm willing to bet that many of these women--if they, indeed, return---will go back part-time, or to slower-track jobs that afford them more family time and flexibility. Even Shellenbarger's article has anecdotes that seem to reflect that. What I'm seeing all around me is a general downshifting among women after having kids. So even those who are in the workforce are working part-time or at these slower track jobs. "Where have all the ambitious women gone?" a friend of mine once asked.
I know that conservative types are going to seize on this data as proof that mothers just are drawn to the home, that we really are essentially different from fathers in that way. But I don't think the movement home isn't quite for the reasons that conservatives would have, or that the journalist Lisa Belkin suggested in her infamous New York Times magazine article about "women opting out" of a few years ago. It isn't simply a matter of individual "choice." Our choices are inevitably constrained by the culture, so while women may be talking about their "choice" to quit work for a few years and stay at home, you have to look at what their realistic options were.
Our country is notable in the western, industrialized world for providing absolutely no social supports: quality child care is horrendously expensive and hard to find, paid maternity leave is ridiculously short (six weeks versus the six months and longer many European nations offer), and most workplaces offer limited or no flexibility, based on the 1950s assumption that there is a spouse at home.
For many American women, their "choices" are to go back to a full time 40 plus hour a week job six weeks after giving birth and put their baby in a less-than-wonderful day care center or hire an expensive nanny who may be illegal or less than reliable, or they can quit their job. That isn't much of a choice.



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The few of you who have been following this blog know that I haven't posted in a few weeks. Life and many deadlines have intervened. But I have some interesting news to report.

I am one of 18 journalists who are New York Times Company Foundation fellows, chosen to attend a conference, "The Status of Boys: Crisis or Not." As you may know, the press has been filled with stories in recent years of the "crisis" boys are facing: boys are more likely than girls to drop out from high school, be treated for ADHD, commit suicide, and fail to go on to college. At the same time, though, there has been a steady chorus of naysayers, mostly feminists who suggest the numbers are being skewed and that, in fact, we're seeing a backlash against girls' progress.

The first day of the conference was devoted to giving us a big picture view of this issue. In the morning, Marcellus Andrews, Ph.D., a Yale-trained economist who describes himself as a "leftie," spoke about a large segment of men in this country who have become what he calls "surplus males." They are, he says, not just "unemployed, but unemployable." No skills, no education, no training.

A large chunk of these men end up in prison, with statistics showing that the vast majority of inmates having a high school education or less. Whereas in the past, men without a college degree could make a decent living as a blue collar worker, those jobs have evaporated, as our economy has moved from a manufacturing based economy to a knowledge economy. Women seem to be adjusting better to this shift, attending to colleges in record numbers, Andrews said.

Yet, it needs to be said (he didn't say this): women still earn less than men in virtually every profession and at every rung.

In the afternoon, we heard from a group with opposing views on the subject. What I found most telling was that it was the journalists (Peg Tyre from Newsweek, Tom Chiarella from Esquire, and Richard Whitmire from The New Republic) who were asserting that there was a "boys' crisis," asserting that boys were struggling in school in part because of changes made in education to accommodate girls. The academics and wonks--Rosalind Barnett, Ph.D., a Brandeis University psychologist and women's studies professor, Caryl Rivers, a Boston University journalism professor, and Sara Mead, a senior policy analyst at Education Sector, a D.C. think tank---were arguing that the "crisis" had been overhyped. "There is no boy crisis," says Barnett. "There is a some boy crisis."

In essence, they said girls are doing much better than they had been, while boys' progress has been stagnant. There hasn't been a steep decline in the number of young men attending college, for instance, but there has been a steady increase in the number of young women in college. However, some boys--especially poor minorities--are struggling and faring much worse than their female counterparts.

I found the academics' presentations (especially Mead's) persuasive, as they were grounded in facts--statistics and studies. By comparion, the journalists' work--especially Tyre's Newsweek story-- just didn't hold up under scrutiny.

Tyre relied on "experts" who were dubious at best and didn't bother to seek out the many feminist academics who might disagree with her thesis. Whitmire, at least, seemed a little abashed after hearing the academics' exegesis of the studies and said he would be more skeptical of some of the experts he had relied upon for his story (which was a little more balanced and seemed more of a real attempt to grapple with all sides of the issue.)

I can't quote from Tyre's talk to us; annoyingly, she insisted that Newsweek policies required that only their public relations person speak on behalf of the magazine and that her talk was therefore off the record. (I found this to be disingenous; how many Newsweek reporters are on TV on a regular basis talking about their stories? We weren't planning to quote her on Newsweek's policies, but rather how she put together this story and responds to criticisms of it.)

It was, though, very instructive for me. It's very easy to find anecdotes and experts to support your thesis; editors love sexy, high concept stories, especially if they involve middle class suburbanites. Would Newsweek have splashed the story on its cover if it said, "Some low income boys, especially AFrican American and Latinas, are having trouble in school"? Doubt it.


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