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.

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.