Working Moms Strike Back
Speaking out in favor of stay-at-home moms in our elite media is a little like wearing a Red Sox hat at Yankee Stadium.

June 1, 2001 3:15 p.m.

o stay-at-home moms host TV shows. This I learned from my brief foray into the "mommy wars" over the last few weeks.

Speaking out in favor of stay-at-home moms in our elite media is a little like wearing a Red Sox hat at Yankee Stadium — the natives aren't going to appreciate it, and won't hesitate to let you know. There has been a "how dare you?" tone to much of the reaction to the cover story I wrote in a recent issue of National Review ("Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Children in day care — and the mothers who put them there," May 28, 2001).

At the beginning of one TV appearance, a very defensive career-mom host (for those keeping score at home — Judith Regan of Fox News) opened with a long and angry account of her own success at juggling work and mothering, then asked, "Rich, are you still there?" As if I was supposed to just slink off in shame for my sheer outrageousness in suggesting it is preferable for mothers to care for their own young children.

In lieu of slinking, I want to address a few of the criticisms of my piece. Let's start with Washington Post columnist Marjorie Williams (not many stay-at-home moms have newspaper columns either, by the way).

Williams wrote a harsh piece, partly prompted, it appears, by my unwillingness to use weasel language. Her attitude seems to be that one can defend stay-at-home moms only if you stipulate at great length that you are really, really, really sorry for holding such a position, and understand the heroism of moms who choose to leave their kids in day care all day long.

Well, that sort of stilted rule for discussing this issue is another indication of exactly the point I was making in my piece: that elite culture, especially the media, is biased in favor of working moms. In her op-ed — which is deeply conflicted — Williams admits as much: "Lowry does come uncomfortably close to the truth in describing the media's anxious reluctance to run bad news on the topic of day care."

But Williams thinks she has caught me in a contradiction: disapproving of those moms who choose to work while also regretting — and advocating changes that will minimize — the sort of economic and personal circumstances that force moms into the workforce. Maybe I need to brush up on my Euclid, but this doesn't seem to be the least bit contradictory to me.

She also objects to the terms in which I disapprove of the "voluntary" career moms when I write that they are "not normal." The word "normal," as John Derbyshire writes in the current National Review, has become radioactive, but it is appropriate in this case. As I wrote in the piece: Women who choose to leave their kids in the care of strangers are a historical novelty, a minority of contemporary women, and not the norm that should be encouraged by society.

Even one of my critics confided to me over the phone that leaving a child in day care is extremely difficult, that it is "not natural." If anyone doubts this they should read Marjorie Williams's wrenching column a few months ago ("Mommy at Her Desk," April 25, 2001) about her guilt and doubt regarding her own decision to be a career mom.

Why this particular lifestyle choice — with, at the very least, the agonizing it brings the moms involved and the heartache it brings kids — should be glorified in our culture and promoted by our public policy is a deep mystery.

Indeed, survey after survey shows most women would prefer to spend more time with their young children. The scandal of feminism, of course, is that most women know that they are not entirely autonomous economic actors, and that they have natural impulses and familial responsibilities that can't be blithely ignored.

But feminists want to ignore exactly this. They have no interest in encouraging the choice to stay at home, and oppose those policy changes that would make it easier for mothers to do so — cutting taxes on families, discouraging divorce and illegitimacy.

One final point on Williams: She seems to suggest that I made up one study I cite, faulting me for not naming it. It was a 1994 international meta-analysis by Claudio Violato and Clare Russell of the University of Calgary, involving 22,000 children, which found an association between full-time day care and insecure mother attachment.

Williams quite correctly points out that a more recent, authoritative study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found a more modest connection between day care and insecure mother attachment than the one I cited. She is also correct to point out that the NICHD study found that a mother's sensitivity to her child is an important factor in forging a secure mother-child bond.

But what Williams — conveniently — fails to note is that the NICHD study also found that a mother's sensitivity tends to decrease as a child spends more time in day care. That Williams should ignore this point is not surprising.

Much of the day-care debate consists of commentators like Williams gamely trying to escape the inescapable: the fact that, on average, it is better for a child to be cared for by his mother than by a day-care worker.

In a New York Post column, Maggie Gallagher objected to the idea in my piece that working moms should suffer some stigma: "Maybe a little stigma," I had written, "is exactly what they deserve." Gallagher suggests that I want working moms to wear scarlet W's and to be shunned by polite society.

But stigma can obviously fall short of this. What I had in mind was something along the lines of the mild disapproval that now attaches to staying at home with children. Women are subjected to a constant propaganda barrage that says it is only in work that they can find fulfillment and be productive citizens.

Why can't the cultural bias work the other way? Why can't staying at home with a young child be celebrated as a beautiful and responsible choice? And why can't the malodor that our contemporary culture creates around staying at home instead apply to the selfishness and materialism that informs the choices of some career moms? Those are two qualities, after all, that we're willing to condemn in other circumstances.

Gallagher (along with Williams) implies that I'm an enthusiast for the idea of working single moms. I'm not. The fact is that it is best for a child to have two parents, but failing that, it is best to have mom working rather than living on welfare.

Two last points:

1) Some critics suggested I shouldn't have written the piece because I have a Y chromosome. But personal knowledge shouldn't be essential to writing about a topic: I have never shot down an incoming ICBM, but still write about missile defense.

2) Some critics faulted me for focusing on women in my piece. Well, it was a piece about working moms. For the record: Yes, husbands play a role in pushing their wives to work, in order to maintain a higher standard of living. And yes, divorce and illegitimacy are issues that directly implicate male familial and sexual irresponsibility.

For all the stay-at-home moms who wrote nice notes and shared their experiences in response to the article, thank you so much. These notes were the most gratifying thing about writing the piece.