Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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> Is it possible that this group of women self-selects out of the workforce -- or the other way around, the women that achieve high career status tend to select out of stay-at-home motherhood?

Obviously nobody is forcing women to stay at home at the point of a gun. However, I think it can't be discounted the degree to which women are pressured socially to take on primary caregiver roles.

My wife and I (~30, educated professionals) have a 8-month old. My wife as zero interest in staying at home. But from the minute she got pregnant the pressure started. My mom and her mom (both of whom work/ed) suggested that may she should stay at home for a few years when the baby was young. She's constantly bombarded by parenting fads that tell her she's a bad mom if she doesn't breastfeed/wear her baby around in a sling/etc. Those fads are never very compatible with professional working life.

Meanwhile, nobody has any expectations of me. Nobody wonders why I don't take a few years off to raise the kid. None of the parenting fads are aimed at me. Heck, my own mother gets nervous whenever I have responsibility for the kid.

The interesting part of this comment is that the indignant language is not directed at the system that enforces incompatibility between a professional life and family life.

What do you mean? To me, he seems perturbed by society placing expectations on women that are not placed on men. This seems very reasonable.

You might think so, he might even think so, but this is the real conflict:

> Those fads are never very compatible with professional working life.

Otherwise, why would he even say that? He'd say, "my wife isn't convinced by the science" or, "my wife isn't interested in that" but he doesn't -- he says the 'fads' are incompatible with a professional working life (nb: breastfeeding & baby-wearing have been practiced since basically the beginning of humanity; calling them 'fads' is particularly uncharitable).

His (his wife's) conflict is that socially-defined 'good mothering' (of the 2013 variety) is at odds with professional life, and he (his wife) feels understandably insufficient when she's getting blasted with messages like 'breast is best!'. So their defense is to fight against societal gender expectations which is exactly what the system wants you to do because while everyone is arguing about whether men can breastfeed, nobody is arguing about missing the formative years of their child's life because you can only buy a house with two incomes.

> (nb: breastfeeding & baby-wearing have been practiced since basically the beginning of humanity; calling them 'fads' is particularly uncharitable)

Educated, upper-income Americans acting like they're prehistoric villagers is, in fact, the root of several different fads.

You're not wrong, generally, but sometimes the way we first did things really is the best way. Studies show breastfeeding & baby-wearing to be beneficial:

-Breastfed individuals were more likely to be upwardly mobile (http://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2013/04/24/archdischild-201...)

-Breastfeeding improves brain development in infants (http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2013/06/breastfeeding, journal article here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811913...)

-Increased Carrying Reduces Infant Crying (http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/77/5/641.abstr...)

-Baby wearing & co-sleeping decreases crying & GORD (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15780481)

That is not to mention the psychological benefits of physical closeness which I assume you don't need cites for.

Most of those studies suffer from a key flaw: they ignore maternal education/income. Since more educated women from higher-income families are more likely to breastfeed, you would expect breastfed children to score better in areas like brain development.

The bottom-line for my wife and I in making the choice was: is there any improvement in IQ in the long-term? And the answer seems to be no: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-02/breast-feeding-is-n... (study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633819).

The first study I linked accounted for maternal IQ:

> In an ordinal regression model, markers of neurological development (cognitive test scores) and stress (emotional stress scores) accounted for approximately 36% of the relationship between breast feeding and social mobility.

The second looked at white matter and sub-cortical gray matter volume which you can either find significant or not significant.

Your own article says:

> Of course, breast-feeding is a healthy thing to do. It enhances the baby’s immune system, and builds a bond with mom

which I consider positive things. But it also makes bizarre claims, like:

> Working mothers, already strapped by the expenses of new parenthood, cannot necessarily afford to shell out hundreds of dollars for a breast pump and accessories.

...and how much does formula cost?

Ultimately, you've got to just do what you think is best for your kid, and it sounds like you did. As your article says, there is no One True Way. But if having a career makes you compromise on what you think is best for your kid, that's a problem (with the construct of 'careers'), that's my point.

> The first study I linked accounted for maternal IQ: > In an ordinal regression model, markers of neurological development (cognitive test scores) and stress (emotional stress scores) accounted for approximately 36% of the relationship between breast feeding and social mobility.

That quote is referring to the baby's cognitive test scores, not the mother's.

See also: http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2010/07/breastfeeding-and-iq-st....

Also: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10224215 ("Significant relations between breastfeeding and Woodcock Reading Achievement scores at 11 years were also reduced to nonsignificant levels after the inclusion of maternal IQ and the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment.")

The incompatibilities between being a professional and raising a child that way (fad or otherwise) are practical problems. An office building is not the place to raise an infant. Not to be crude, but a well trained dog would be less intrusive and lower maintenance but most offices aren't big on even those. This becomes even more clear when you look at workplaces beyond professional office environments. Expecting factories to allow mothers to carry their infants around in slings throughout the workday is unreasonable. Those workplaces are not and cannot be designed with that in mind.

No, I think I agree with rayiner. The real problem is that women are expected to raise their children in that peculiar way. We have infrastructure and social constructs that allow mothers to remain professionals but now society is telling mothers that if they want to be good mothers then they cannot take advantage of those things. "Good" mothers don't take advantage of modern convenience but instead do it the prehistoric way that is fundamentally at odds with maintaining a career. That is the problem.

No, the problem is that a career as we've defined it is required in the first place (desired is a different animal). Why can't a mother co-work with other mothers? Or consult while her partner watches the kid/s? Or choose to do only mothering? Or find some other way to combine career and motherhood in proportions that aren't 90/10? "Well, if she isn't in the office from 9-6 she won't get promoted, or she'll get caught in the next round of downsizing, or we can't collaborate as well", congratulations, you're now part of the problem.

Some offices do reduce the friction with on-premise daycare, breastfeeding/pumping rooms, flexible schedules, work from home, etc. It's not an insurmountable problem.

> society is telling mothers that if they want to be good mothers then they cannot take advantage of those things.

Looking at US society I can't agree with that. Daycare is pervasive. Walking down the halls here I see many women, many of them with pictures of their young children in their cubes. Perhaps it's different here in SV, but I don't think so.

What I do see is a lot of this kind of talk on the part of young professional mothers, and this makes me think it is a defense mechanism -- that the mothers actually would like to spend more time with their kids, maybe not breastfeed or maybe so, but in any case, the current proportion of career and motherhood is not fulfilling to them.

[Since I mentioned the office, I will add the standard disclaimer that this opinion is my own and not that of my employer's. I don't talk about this stuff at work.]

> (desired is a different animal)

Desired is what we are talking about. It seems you would have women choose between their career and their child. Your attitude towards working mothers is an exemplification of the problem.

Mothers can do all of the things you have said... all of those things except continue their careers as other adults without society judging them for it.

Calls of "Or choose to do only mothering?" are the problem, not the solution.

> Desired is what we are talking about.

You have no way of knowing that, and even if you did it's uninteresting to talk about because 'doing what you desire to do' is the universal struggle of humanity. Yawn.

> It seems you would have women choose between their career and their child.

I thought you were getting it and now I see the point has missed you completely. Listen carefully, this is important: women should be free to choose the proportions they desire, whether that's 90% work 10% mothering, 70/30, 50/50, 0/100, x/y. But they can't, because while you can be a 10% mother fairly successfully by using daycare and public school, you can't be a 20% "career woman". Your choices are either to be full-bore into your career at the expense of everything else, part-time somewhere in which case your paycheck doesn't cover daycare so why bother (oh and now you can't afford a house, sorry), or abandon your career aspirations altogether. Actually, some women manage to get pretty close to 90/90, but if you can show me someone who's done that for 18 years I'll be impressed, I can't find any. Having extended family around helps.

> Calls of "Or choose to do only mothering?" are the problem, not the solution.

Completely wrong, but you might have misunderstood what I said above which was that women should feel free to choose only mothering, if that's what they want to do. Surely advocating that women be able to do as they choose isn't the problem?

Note that this doesn't apply exclusively to women, men have the same battle but it's of course socially acceptable (expected) for men to sacrifice family for career, sorry champ, not gonna make it to the big game, daddy's got to bring home the bacon. We did it to ourselves, though. If you still don't get it reread my comment and substitute "women" with "everyone".

> Obviously nobody is forcing women to stay at home at the point of a gun. However, I think it can't be discounted the degree to which women are pressured socially to take on primary caregiver roles.

My wife and I (~30, educated professionals) have a 8-month old. My wife as zero interest in staying at home. But from the minute she got pregnant the pressure started. My mom and her mom (both of whom work/ed) suggested that may she should stay at home for a few years when the baby was young. She's constantly bombarded by parenting fads that tell her she's a bad mom if she doesn't breastfeed/wear her baby around in a sling/etc. Those fads are never very compatible with professional working life.

And the moment we start talking about married women, the wider discussion of the pay gap (assuming it is only due to working less) becomes less of an apples to apples comparison. Your spouse, at least by law, shares your income (as you do hers), and has alimony in the event of a divorce.

I don't know if you were thinking at all about the wider discussion (tangents are of course ok to have), but I thought I should just mention it since it didn't seem to have gotten much mention in this thread.

> Meanwhile, nobody has any expectations of me. Nobody wonders why I don't take a few years off to raise the kid. None of the parenting fads are aimed at me. Heck, my own mother gets nervous whenever I have responsibility for the kid.

I like how you say that nobody has any expectations of you, and then contradict yourself in the last sentence. Clearly your mother has the expectation that you will have less responsibility for your child than your spouse. That is still an expectation. And people in general are probably expecting that you won't take time off for work to look after your child. That kind of expectation a blessing for somebody, and a burden for others. Maybe you have less expectations in the sense that you aren't expected to do more paid labour than your wife, but I doubt it.

What is more controversial: a stay-at-home dad or a mother who works full time? In some ways the expectations put on women are more flexible, or shall I say optional, than the ones put on men.

> Your spouse, at least by law, shares your income (as you do hers), and has alimony in the event of a divorce.

Not anywhere on the east coast (all separate property states). In any case, that's besides the point. I'm as eligible for any property division in case of divorce as she is, but I don't get bombarded from all angles with pressure to be the one to downshift my career to stay at home.

> I like how you say that nobody has any expectations of you.

You're arguing semantics. I'm just saying they don't expect me to sacrifice my career to raise the kid.

> That kind of expectation a blessing for somebody, and a burden for others.

Perhaps, but one thing is much less fuzzy: the things that women are pressured to do are much less financially lucrative. And in a country where money is everything, that's a critically important distinction.

The grass is always greener, especially when you remember someone lifting their leg and peeing on your own grass last month.

I would bet that ~100% of the women with small children who stay at home sometimes get inappropriate suggestions that they are choosing to waste their potential.

I would bet that ~100% of the women with small children who work full time sometimes get inappropriate suggestions that they are choosing to be an inferior mother.

Both sting. And there is no polite response.

FWIW, the biological mother as the default primary care giver for very small children seems to be a cultural universal. (That is not to suggest that the default should be assumed to be automatically superior.)

> FWIW, the biological mother as the default primary care giver for very small children seems to be a cultural universal. (That is not to suggest that the default should be assumed to be automatically superior.)

It's a default that made sense back when men had to go hunt an elk to feed the family.

There was some period of time when our daughter wanted her mother more than me, but at 8 months she seems neutral as between us. It helps that she's bottle fed and I do the night feedings, so we've bonded over that.

This is all something that makes much more sense in 2013 when I don't have to go elk hunting.

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