By offering a steady diet of common myths and ignoring the relevant facts, newspapers have helped maintain the cultural temperature for what Williams calls “the most family-hostile public policy in the Western world.” On a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, afterschool programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. How far behind? Out of 168 countries surveyed by Jody Heymann, who teaches at both the Harvard School of Public Health and McGill University, the U.S. is one of only five without mandatory paid maternity leave—along with Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on nineteenth century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Debunking the Mommy Wars
Here's an excerpt from E.J. Graff's article in the Columbia Journalism Review which pokes holes in an almost entirely media-created controversy:
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4 comments:
the U.S. is one of only five without mandatory paid maternity leave - along with Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.
I hate these stories that seize on one data point where we differ from the rest of the world to show that we're backwards and archaic in our public policy. They don't pass the common sense laugh test. Can you think of any other way that we're comparable with those other four countries?
This country is great because we have a relatively free market. In a free market, people have to make choices and those choices have costs. Attempts to engineer the costs of those choices out of the economy will not be beneficial overall.
I agree on the point about rhetorical tricks, but I also think that trends in social modernization like this often resemble trends in technological modernization, in that once most of the world is on board, it's only a matter of time that the rest of the so-called "First World" inevitably follows suit, whether they want to or not, and for better or worse, although, in this case, I think it's for the better.
Just to be clear, you think that we should pay for maternity leave, either through tax dollars or by mandating that companies pay for it?
Legislation is never a first resort, and I would rather see a voluntary change of attitude first. The article was mostly taking the press to task for creating a false dichotomy that feeds hostile workplace attitudes toward working mothers, who undeniably make up a huge proportion of the nation's work force. It would be a lot more cost-effective to taxpayers to accomodate them than force them out, particularly single mothers who have no other options. The attitude of hostility prompts those of us without kids to feel justified in asking for equal time to do our own (maybe less crucial) extracurricular stuff, thus costing businesses more money. If parenthood were viewed as an unavoidable part of life, and maybe even a positive part of life, by employers, maybe it wouldn't be necessary to resort to legislation.
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