Thursday, March 26, 2009

Vote! Should media continue the Mommy Wars?

Unsurprisingly, “The Case Against Breastfeeding” has provoked a deluge of responses (including my earlier one), and like clockwork the media have digested Hannah Rosin’s nuanced, complex (and problematic) account of her own experience into a soundbite. MSNBC, for example, blithely spews, “Some women are questioning whether the health benefits are worth it. Breast-feeding provides benefits to mothers and babies, but can also be uncomfortable and inconvenient for working moms.” Our work culture erects nearly insurmountable barriers to breastfeeding, so we should…forget breastfeeding. The bathwater is indispensable; out with the baby.

It gets better. Find this at the bottom of the MSNBC article: “Vote! Should Mothers Breastfeed Their Babies?”

Hilarious. An article decrying the oppressiveness of judging women for their breastfeeding practices prompts a public vote to tell mothers whether to breastfeed.

For a soundbite that gets it right, try this from MomsRising: “Moms are being urged to breastfeed but set up to fail.” Quite.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

How about a bailout for single moms?

We're aren't hearing much about the needs of women, let alone single moms, for economic stimulus these days, so word out to Kelly White, writing at WeNews. Her article is jam-packed with data, including this addendum to my post about the high cost of childcare: single mothers spends 45 percent of their income on childcare. And you wonder why so many single moms and their children are in poverty.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

The case against self-hatred

Where to begin to rebut the “Case Against Breastfeeding”? In this month’s Atlantic, Hannah Rosin claims breastfeeding keeps women down—she compares it to the vacuum cleaner of the 50s ‘Feminine Mystique'—and that the evidence for its health benefits is thin.

There are some serious flaws in Rosin’s claims about the science, nicely described here. And the idea that breastfeeding is itself as oppressive as being a 1950s housewife is just weird.

But what I find the most intriguing element of the piece is what shows up in the first two paragraphs. Rosin describes being ostracized in the playground when she tells other mothers she’s thinking about cutting short the breastfeeding of her third child.
…circles were redrawn such that I ended up in the class of mom who, in a pinch, might feed her baby mashed-up Chicken McNuggets. In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic. But breast-feeding is the real ticket into the club.
There’s so much here to, as they used to say in grad school, unpack, that the mind reels. It’s a classic reactionary setup, really quite Rovian: It sets up a hated elite (lattes and chardonnay here are replaced by organic snacks and sleek strollers, but the effect is the same as in a Limbaugh rant) who engage in terrible oppression, which justifies a counter-attack, much as the Christian right typically must paint themselves as oppressed and embattled to justify their attacks on gays, civil liberties, and women’s reproductive rights.

Yet in the real world, it’s women who breastfeed for the full two years the WHO recommends who are the struggling minority in the U.S. Only 31 percent of U.S. babies are breastfed exclusively for even three months, and only 11 percent are exclusively breastfed through six months, and that with breastfeeding having recently reached new highs. Among the reasons women most commonly cite for giving up breastfeeding or supplementing with formula is—can you guess?—returning to work. This is no surprise, given that there is no such thing as paid family leave in this country, nor even are most workers guaranteed their jobs back if they take unpaid leave.

In my highly progressive, pro-breastfeeding circles, I know of almost no mothers who returned to work fulltime who continued breastfeeding exclusively. It is nearly impossible to do so.

Still, I think Rosin is, in a warped way, on to something in perceiving herself ostracized among her privileged community for considering cutting breastfeeding off. Our misogynistic culture maddeningly, at once curtails our choices (by not offering paid leave, for example, or for permitting hospital practices that discourage breastfeeding) and valorizes individual choice as its pre-eminent value. Women often respond to this contradiction by turning on other women. It exacts such a toll in this culture to acknowledge that one hasn’t acted freely—especially in the deeply intimate sphere of reproduction--that many women would prefer to embrace their supposed “choices” and vilify other women who made different “choices.”

I think of the friend of mine who, while 8 months pregnant, was sneered at by another mother for planning a nonmedicated birth. “Well, if you want to be a martyr, you go right ahead.” Given the high rate of women who report having had disempowering birth experiences, I suspect that many women who have experienced awful treatment in birth have as the path of least resistance embraced their “choices,” leaving no honest outlet for their anger, which gets channeled at other women.

This is a problem that goes way beyond breastfeeding and it’s far past time for women to stop turning on each other. I welcome thoughts.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Childcare is breaking families' budgets

Nearly one-third: that's the share childcare takes out of the budget of the average middle-income family of four with young children. Eating up 29 percent of their money, childcare represents the single largest item in these families' budgets, according to a report from Pre-K Now.

If you don't have kids and this figure astounds you, I'm here to tell you it's about right. I guess my partner and I and our two kids are getting a bargain; only 25 percent of our budget goes to childcare.

Given that a parent can't work for a wage unless she has childcare and (especially since the end of welfare) can't live unless she has a wage-earning job (or a sugar daddy), this is a crisis.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Boys been reading Rock the Cradle

Some college kids in California have filed a ballot initiative to do just what I’ve been advocating: get the government out of the marriage business. No surprise, the media are largely getting it wrong, calling it a “gay marriage initiative” and suggesting it’s a joke.

The boys’ initiative would erase “marriage” from the legal books and grant everyone the right to “domestic partnerships,” gay or straight. It’s unclear to me whether the contract would have to be a sexual one, or if you could create a union with your sister, friend, cousin, whatever, for purposes of life partnership, sexual or not.

I first learned of this from a libertarian-leaning blog in my home state, which got the point better than the MSM mostly did, although he did file the post under “gays.” Are other posts tagged “straights”? “Squares”? “Bigots”?

And the initiative sponsors don’t have quite the right analysis of their brilliant idea, calling it a “compromise.” There’s nothing compromising about it. It's a radical departure in the right direction. See my blog post on the subject.

Anyway, way to go, boys.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

This trend just in

Different media same day: “Some Laid-Off Women Now Stay-at-Home Moms” (MSNBC) and “As Economy Slips, New Mothers Cut Short Their Maternity Leave" (Wall Street Journal). I thought I’d wandered into an Onion parody. Which is it—are women being opted out or opted in?

Both stories are no doubt true—as descriptions of the experiences of some moms, somewhere. But that’s not how the pieces are framed. Instead they purport to describe a new “trend.” Trend stories are the slipperiest game in journalism. Journalists especially love to get breathless about supposed trends in women’s social roles, mixing up description and prescription, from the supposed marriage dearth peddled in the 1980s and debunked soon after by Susan Faludi to the “opt-out revolution” hyped by the New York Times’ Lisa Belkin in this century and debunked by Joan Williams in the American Prospect, among others. The New York Times’ trend stories are weirdest, warped as they are by the confluence of gender and class. Their m.o. is to pick some tiny slice of the East Coast’s ultra-privileged and take them as representative of the whole country.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Strollers are bad for you

I always wondered what the effects of all the containerization we subject kids to these days might be. From carseats to strollers to high chairs to motorized baby swings, we love to place our babies inside of plastic containers removed from human contact.

It didn’t seem like the effects could be good. My kids howl whenever I stick them in their lonely carseats, although the sensory deprivation eventually puts them to sleep.

Researchers in Britain wondered, too, and have found evidence that, indeed, forward-facing strollers, which cut children and parents off from almost all sensory contact with each other—no touch, no eye contact, on noisy streets we can't even hear each other—have bad effects. Spending a lot of time in one of these strollers apparently retards children’s language development.

I fear that the stroller controversy will become one more thing for moms to feel guilty about and one more thing for poor folks who can’t afford fancy front-back convertible strollers to get beat up about. Keep in mind, though, a swag of cloth tying a baby to your body beats the fanciest stroller any day.
Link
(And I’m still unconvinced by the efforts to tell parents that a fancy crib is better than sleeping with their babies. Last I checked we were still mammals, and mammal babies need touch. To convince me otherwise, show me the research and don’t sweep all those crib recalls under the rug.)