Not many men would willingly enter the fray between stay-at-home and working moms. But Neil Gilbert’s scholarly A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market and Policy Shape Family Life isn’t just a foray into the Mommy Wars. It’s an attempt to understand the bizarre statistics behind plummeting birthrates and, says the UC Berkeley social welfare professor, a culture that doesn’t just undervalue domestic choices and overvalue career life, it increasingly outsources the care of its children.

“One in five women are childless,” says Gilbert. “The population of women with one child (has) nearly doubled. In the history of the world, you had events like this in periods of plague and pestilence and war, but this was an immensely prosperous era. Why did this happen? Nobody had an answer.”

In the space of a single generation, the national proportion of childless women - women who, at the end of their childbearing years, have no offspring - has nearly doubled from 10 percent in 1976, to 18 percent in 2002, according to U.S. Census figures.

“It has tremendous implications for the future of society,” says Gilbert. “Women are not only having fewer kids, these children, when their emotional, psychological life is being formed, their care is being outsourced to strangers. What’s going on here?”

At some point, says the father of four, people in this market-driven culture began contemplating major life decisions not in terms of religion or morality, but cost and benefits.

“When you apply that calculation to having children,” he says wryly, “it’s a wonder anyone has children.”

Part of the problem, says Gilbert, is that policymakers’ efforts to support families aren’t particularly family-friendly.

“How could we level the playing field?” he says. “By designing policies that don’t automatically create an incentive to push mothers into the labor market. Provide them with Social Security credits. Give them a return to work on ramp - benefits which allow you to go back to school to retread, facilitate the transition. Health care.”

Instead, he says, society has come to believe the so-called “mommy track,” a less-ambitious career path that allows time for child-rearing, is a bad thing, or that taking time off from a career will forever damage one’s earning power or hinder one’s self-fulfillment.

It’s an idea propounded by several recent, much-buzzed about books - including Linda Hirshman’s “Get to Work “… and Get a Life Before It’s Too Late” and Leslie Bennetts’ “Feminine Mistake.” And it’s promoted, says Gilbert, by tenured professors, reporters and an “elite” white collar class who don’t have “real jobs.”

“Most of the people working in the world have real jobs,” he says, “and it’s bloody difficult.”

Instead, he says, parents need to take a “sequential approach.”

“My argument,” says Gilbert, “is for many people - not for everyone and not for the elite, but for most people - if they didn’t work those five, seven, eight years, it would make almost no difference about where you end up. Raise a family and then go off to work for 30 years.”

Source: Centre Daily Times, PA
http://www.centredaily.com/living/story/687240.html