Are working moms happier?
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Parenting on 2 Oct 2009.
“The mother loves her child most divinely,
not when she surrounds him with comfort and anticipates his wants,
but when she resolutely holds him to the highest standards
and is content with nothing less than his best.” ~ Hamilton Wright
Should moms stay home, or go out to work?
Hmm. Way back in the days of old, it was a given for mothers to stay at home and raise kids. Who else to raise the kids if women left home? A hundred years ago education for girls was not as widespread and accessible as it is today, and there were fewer jobs for women. Some say those were less complex times, an innocent age, when it was possible to talk about finding fulfilment in living one’s life for one’s children.
Today it is almost inconceivable that women, especially well-educated ones, think about nursing children instead of advancing careers. For better or worse, life goes on. For those who juggle career and children, the competing demands of both must weigh heavy on their minds. Interestingly, a new US study says “working mothers don’t have enough time in the day and feel guiltier than stay-at-home mums, but they’re just as happy.”
Four out of every 10 say they always feel rushed, compared with a quarter of the other two groups, according to data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, with 62 percent of working mothers saying they would prefer to work part-time.
Only 37 percent of working mothers would prefer to work full-time compared to 79 percent of working fathers saying they would prefer full-time work.
“But despite these pressures and conflicts, working moms, overall, are as likely as at-home moms and working dads to say they’re happy with their lives,” the researchers said in a statement.
They found 36 percent of working mothers were very happy with their lives — the same as at-home mothers — while single mothers with children aged under 18 were the least happy group.
Stay-at-home mothers rated their parenting skills more highly than their working peers, with 43 percent giving themselves a score of 9 or 10 on the job they are doing as parents. Only 33 percent of working mothers rated themselves a 9 or 10.
Read the rest here.
In a provocative new book defending stay-at-home moms titled Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Wonder Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes, Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution believes the future of our children lies with at home moms. According to her, the reasons we’re seeing more problems in today’s youths can be traced to absentee moms and dads. A review of Eberstadt’s book quotes: “Divorce and dual income, dual income and divorce,” she writes. “The refrain hums like a mantra through the literature” of dysfunctional youth.
The review goes on to say:
Eberstadt is very effective in making her case that as “more and more children have spent considerably less time in the company of their parents… the fundamental measures of their well being” have scandalously declined. For example, in the first anecdote in the book’s first chapter — about day care, which children now attend while still in their diapers — she sympathetically describes a sick toddler, who should be home in bed, spending all day at a daycare center plaintively calling for his mommy. Child-care workers report that parents who are unable or unwilling to miss a day at work often dose such youngsters with Tylenol to bring down their fevers before dropping them off at day care. Eberstadt also describes angry two- and three-year-olds who act out their aggression, and wonders about the mental state of “babies and toddlers who take up biting as a habit.”
Provocative reading for sure. You can take a look at the whole review here.
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