Mothers: More Bonding/Less Available?
by Donald Devine

“We are better mothers than our mothers.” At least that is the subliminal message from Professor Suzanne M. Bianchi in a new book, “Changing Rhythms of American Family Life,” backed by the Russell Sage Foundation and the American Sociological Association. It is based on an on-going Census Bureau study she herself had led for sixteen years. The headlines were too good to be true, salving the consciences of mothers everywhere: “Despite Mommy Guilt, Time With Kids Increasing.”

“We might have expected mothers to curtail the time spent caring for their children but they seem not to have done so,” reported Bianchi the chairman of the University of Maryland sociology department and former president of the Population Association of America. While women still performed twice as much child care and housework as men in two-parent families, and almost all of this in single ones, mothers actually have increased the amount of time spent with their children. For married women, direct childcare activities increased from 10.6 hours per week in 1965 to 12.9 hours a week in 2000. Single mothers reported increasing from 7.5 to 11.8 hours per week.

In what it curiously labels as greater “gender equality,” the study--by Bianchi, the lead author, with professors John Robinson and Melissa Milkie--found that men and women worked about equal hours. Yet, there were great differences among women. Women without children worked and were paid about the same as men. Mothers worked even more total hours, at 71 per week, but it was almost equally divided between paid and unpaid work and they earned less. Married fathers worked significantly longer hours for pay but also increased their hours of child care from 3 to 7 hours and even of housework from 4.4 hours in 1965 to 9.7 hours per week in 2000, which however was not enough to offset a 13 hour decline in housework by married mothers.

“It seems reasonable to expect that parental investment in child-rearing would have declined” since the 1960s, reports the study, when 60 percent of all children lived in families with a breadwinning father and stay-at-home mother, while today only 30 percent live in such families. Yet, in 1965 all mothers spent 10.2 hours per week “tending primarily to their children—feeding them, reading with them or playing games, for example” based upon detailed time journals kept by thousands of women (and men). That number dipped in the 1970s and 1980s, began rising in the 1990s and is now “higher than ever at nearly 14.1 hours per week,” according to the study.

This increase in hours of care for children by parents even with more hours working outside the home was explained by two main factors. Potential parents who did not want children and presumably would not care for them as well now had birth control readily available to avoid the responsibility. The remaining parents presumably were willing to commit more effort to child care. Second, parents had fewer children so they could devote more energy—and with increasing affluence, more funds--to each one. “As parents have fewer children, they feel “pressure to rear a perfect child,” Bianchi explained.

The mothers themselves seemed a bit more skeptical than the professors. They still feel guilty. “It’s almost like it doesn’t matter how much they do, they feel they do not do enough,” Bianchi pondered. Perhaps, the mothers know better what their mothers really did to provide “care.” The study only counts direct time spent with children by mothers. It admits it did not measure what it calls “availability,” or having parents available for children, just being there if needed. In fact, in the 1950s the mothers’ mothers thought too much time directly hovering over children was smothering.

Earlier mothers thought children should develop their own skills and that the best experience for them was experimental. Life was viewed as risky and children needed to test their coping skills rather than always running to mother, which was discouraged. But it was a risky world and it was considered invaluable that mother be available for crises, protection and even for simple child questioning when issues were still fresh in mind. To ignore this type of time was to ignore the most important time with children according to the previous generation of mothers.

To go to work is by definition not to “be there.” At a time when being at work outside the home is near universal for modern mothers, to recognize the importance of simply being available is a rebuke and is much better ignored. The fact that earlier mothers cared for more children only makes the comparison more invidious. Actually, the study does record something close to “being there” time but calls it “housework,” as if it were simple dusting and scrubbing, which declined among mothers from 32 to 19 hours per week and was replaced in an “almost a one-to-one trade,” as Professor Bianchi phrased it, with paid work, which jumped from 8 hours per week in 1965 to 23 hours in 2000.

While not mentioned in the study, most female work actually does accommodate itself to “being there.” That is why part time, part year, and flexible and irregular hours predominate among American working mothers. Direct time with children has increased since the 1990s as these options have become more available at the demand of U.S. mothers. While the children receive fewer total hours of direct care and being there, they do benefit from the reallocation of outside work to direct care and it is curious why that momentous change is not celebrated in the headlines or the study.

Rather, the report touts a gender equality its own data refute. In presumably liberated 2007 America, nothing could be more unequal among parents than work. Even with the greater domestication of fathers in the study, mothers still devote twice as many hours to both childcare and housework as fathers (and one suspects much of their work is outside and the childcare is playtime). The fact is that fathers are in paid employment 60 percent more hours per week than mothers—still today forty years after the revolution and 87 since the right to vote! A resuscitated Equal Rights Amendment will not change that basic reality.

If it is not clear that today’s mothers are better mothers than their own mothers, the temptations for them against mothering are much greater. Money, rewarding status and self-satisfaction are now universally available to take the place of childrearing time, which often can be boring and draining. As a result, there are fewer two-parent families and there are fewer children per mother. Yet, somehow, since the 1990s American mothers have limited the allure of paid work and transformed the workplace so they could spend more direct time with their children. They may not be as available as their mothers but they may be even more adroit in utilizing the time they are willing to be there with their children.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.