Parade's push for child care

Parade, that feminist rag. Who knew? Perhaps only the unassailably bland newspaper insert could get away with such an unapologetic insistence on the critical need for affordable, high-quality child care, calling it not just a crisis, but a 25-year-old one that is past due for solving.

The choice of anecdotes to lead “The New Push for Quality Child Care” with is deft: Timisha Daniels describes leaving the work force after having a child, deciding that child care would eat up too much of her salary and not trusting child care much anyway. Now her husband is laid off, she’s been struggling to find work, and she wishes she had made a different decision. The story neatly, but gently, illustrates the economic forces that steer women to ever so reasonably enter traps.

The author puts America’s refusal to provide social benefits to mothers in unflattering context by explaining that, “In European nations, high-quality child care, especially for 3- to 6-year-olds, is seen as a right of citizenship. Governments view it as an investment in the nation’s future, and excellent facilities with top-notch care are plentiful,” and noting that the only countries that fail to offer paid parental leave besides the U.S. are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, Liberia, and Swaziland.

Gotta love the blithe sweep of “experts on family issues and child development say the realities of the 21st century demand” social support for child care. (Finally, a journalist uses “experts say” to good ends.) None of this is really groundbreaking, except that after all these decades of day care horror stories and the assumption that child care is a necessary evil, it’s a delight to read so unwavering a disposal of all that. In Parade!

It’s all a little less surprising if you notice that the author is Leslie Bennetts, former New York Times reporter, Vanity Fair contributing writer, and author of The Feminine Mistake, one of the recent salvos in the quote unquote Mommy Wars. Here’s the blurb on the book:

…Women are constantly told that it’s simply too difficult to balance work and family. Not only is this untrue, Bennetts says, but the arguments in favor of stay-at-home motherhood also fail to consider the dangers of dependency and the difficulty of reentering the workforce after opting out. When women sacrifice their financial autonomy by quitting their jobs, they become vulnerable to divorce as well as the potential illness, death, or unemployment of their breadwinner husbands.

Timisha Daniels, exhibit A.

"Nonworking parents"?

I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting this letter published in The New York Times. But as The Daily Show* would say, who needs the old media? I have a blog!

Therefore:

To the editor:
A phrase in the July 5 article “Safety Net Is Fraying for the Very Poor” made me scratch my head. “Nonworking families with children”? As a parent of two small children, I know that no parent is nonworking. I think the phrase the reporter was looking for was “nonearning parents.”

This isn’t just semantics. Accepting that parenting is a socially valuable job that the market fails to remunerate implies providing social benefits to parents, such as paid family leave and what you might call parental wages—welfare without the stigma, without the punitive restrictions and narrow time limits, and with benefits robust enough to actually remove becoming a parent from the list of leading causes of poverty spells. This would mean a repudiation of welfare reform’s insistence on “pushing single mothers into jobs” (as if they didn’t by definition already have them), a policy whose shortcomings your article highlighted.

* Ridiculing newspaper reporters for...using land lines? Excuse me, but just where does Jon Stewart get the loads of good information that go into his monologues? The New York Times and other sources of "aged news." Criticize The New York Times for its failures of journalism, like boosting the case for the Iraq War (which the Daily Show did, briefly), but not for using land lines. (How many times has your cell phone dropped a call--do you want to be the reporter getting the big scoop from a whispering source and having to say, "Can you repeat that louder? What was that? You're breaking up"? Let's hear if for land lines.) This segment was juvenile, unfunny, and plain old mean.

Breastfeeding a crime?

If you thought staying home was the way to avoid being hassled for breastfeeding, watch out for BWI. That’s Breastfeeding While Intoxicated, and apparently it’s a crime, even when done in the privacy of your home. A North Dakota woman was jailed after cops were called to her house on a report of domestic violence, when she appeared drunk and she nursed her baby in front of them. Now the woman is in jail, facing up to five years in prison, and her nursing baby has been taken away from her.

Comments from one of the cops suggests that it wasn’t the drunkenness that got her arrested. It was the breastfeeding. Grand Forks Police Lt. Rahn Farder told the AP, "It is quite unusual for a mother to be breastfeeding her child as we are conducting an investigation, whether she was intoxicated or not." It actually sounds like good parenting in a very stressful circumstance. With cops bursting in and a man possibly having just beaten up the mother, the baby was probably screaming her head off, and there isn’t any better way I know to quiet and soothe an upset baby than breastfeeding.

While it’s probably not healthy for a nursing baby’s mother to be repeatedly intoxicated, there’s no evidence that breastfeeding during a single episode of drunkenness harms a baby at all, as a doctor blogging at Skeptical OB notes. On the other hand, the doctor says, feeding a baby a bottle while drunk actually might be harmful, because mixing formula in the wrong proportions could harm a baby. Yet all the details of the story suggest that the police would not have arrested her if she had been feeding the baby a bottle.

And of course separating a nursing baby from its mother is clearly harmful.

According to Salon, the cops didn’t do a blood alcohol test on either the mother or the baby.

What about the domestic violence that brought the cops to the house? The boyfriend who was likely the cause of the mom’s beat-up face was not charged. And people wonder why women don’t report domestic violence more often.

The mother has apparently pleaded guilty to the charges, which suggests she had a very bad lawyer. The case reeks. Where’s an ambulance-chaser when you need one? ACLU, somebody, sue the pants off that police department.

BTW: Love the Skeptical OB on this story and her point about Americans’ inability to assess relative risk (including her dig about the risk of putting kids in automobiles). She’s got some whiggy ideas about homebirth, though. I suspect she’s using bad data on homebirth safety—I look forward to checking into it.