Editor’s Note: Reposted with permission from the New America
Foundation (www.Newamerica.net). New
America is an American non-profit, nonpartisan public policy institute and think
tank focusing on a wide range of issues, including national security studies,
technology, asset building, health, gender, energy, education, and the economy.
GUEST BLOG—By Jane Greenway Carr, Contributing
Editor, New America Foundation--For a lot of American families today, the
dinner table can feel a minefield, haunted by the ghosts of Leave It To Beavers
past and the present-day social and economic pressures to serve up from-scratch
meals. The pressure for mealtime perfection can get overwhelming, even for a
professional like Cat Cora, the first female Iron Chef.
“It’s a work
in progress every day,” said Cora, who emphasized that even someone like her
isn’t immune to the worries many parents have about the food they put on the
table or send to school or practice with their kids. She shares a household
with a wife and four sons, and is a representative of an emerging new modern
family– a structure whose makeup is increasingly diverse and “becoming the
majority in this country.”
For Cora,
this shift in family structures is creating a “place where parents both have a
role in raising and nurturing the kids.”
Yet, no matter how much parental roles have evolved, the pressures to be
perfect haven’t followed suit. That’s something we need to change, suggested
panelists who joined Cora at a recent New America event, underwritten by Betty
Crocker.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jane Greenway Carr is
an ACLS Public Fellow and Contributing Editor at New America. She holds a PhD
from NYU, where she has been a lecturer and done research at the intersections
between U.S. literary and cultural history and social and political activism.
“The
Internet makes me cry some days,” said Frederick Goodall, the founder of the
popular blog MochaDad, who condemned the shaming of parents on social media. “I
always have to tell my wife – please do not look at Pinterest. Do not let that
make you feel bad about yourself—just think of it as a fantasy land.” Social
media, he suggested, perpetuates stereotypes about “homemaking” with little
basis in fact.
When it
comes to feeding our families, being present matters more than being perfect.
And what are the facts, exactly? “Only about one-fifth of U.S. families have
the structure of one parent staying home,” said Latifa Lyles, the Director of
the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor. “It’s just not a reality anymore. And what
that means is that families have less time.” For her, time is the focal point
of good parenting, even if that means making PB&J more and visiting the
farmers’ market less. “Because time is so valuable, how we spend that time
[with our children] is more critical than anything else,” she said. “When we
get into being the perfect homemaker, we lose ourselves.”
We may also
be missing the larger point: When it comes to feeding our families, being
present matters more than being perfect. “Kids don’t care,” as Cora put it.
“They just want to see you. They want to hear your voice. They want to be told
they’re loved.”
Critically,
this struggle between presence and perfection is one faced by parents from
across the socioeconomic spectrum. Sarah Bowen, associate professor of
Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University, described a
recent study in which she and her colleagues interviewed North Carolina moms
from low-income and middle-class families over a five-year period about how
they feed their kids and the challenges they confront in the process. They
found that middle-class moms are cooking 4-5 nights a week but are discouraged
by media messages that their meals should be organic and from scratch. Poorer
moms are cooking at home too, but since unpredictable work schedules are
increasingly the norm in low-wage jobs, they, too, worry that they’re not
measuring up.
Both the
shame and lack of time may be the structural results of a conflict between
policy progress on nutrition and policy stagnation on other family-related
policies. Liza Mundy, director of New America’s Breadwinning and Caregiving
Program, noted that neither policy debates nor media narratives about childcare
and parental leave have kept pace with those about food and nutrition, where a
hard-won consensus now exists in favor of cooking healthy and eating well.
Promoting healthy eating is important. But the failure to generate policy
support for childcare and paid caregiving leave has obscured the lack of real
choices available to American families.
Goodall, who
used to work in construction, recalled his former boss insisting that he keep
his Blackberry turned on while he was in the delivery room with his wife, who
was giving birth to their third child. He resigned six months later to start
MochaDad, where he has encountered a number of dads who stay at home because of
persistent unemployment post-recession, not because they want to. Citing the
White House Summit on Working Families this past June and the more recent viral
#LeadonLeave campaign (which highlights the fact that the U.S. is the only
developed nation in the world with no paid family leave), Lyles also criticized
Americans’ limited choices and the gendered double standard around taking
parental leave. When women do it, employers question their commitment. Most men
don’t take leave even when it’s offered, and those who do either face Goodall’s
fate or get excessive praise for being dedicated fathers.
The failure to generate policy support for
childcare and paid caregiving leave has obscured the lack of real choices
available to American families.
Still,
there’s at least one national bright spot that could illuminate a path forward
for the rest of the country. Lyles and Mundy both pointed to the example of
California, which offers six weeks of paid leave to parents funded by the
state’s payroll tax. Ten years of data show increased rates of fathers and
mothers alike taking leave and reflect support from the business community.
These results demystify the dissonance, according to Lyles, and show that
having paid leave can become a norm. Mundy echoed this message of hope: “What
you want is people making choices in a landscape where they have real options
and where they have support.”
www.newamerica.net
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