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Authors: Anne-Marie Slaughter
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unendurable. “Children need their mothers” is true. But “Children need their mothers more than they need other loving adults in their lives” is false.
The one time children genuinely cannot do without their biological mothers is during pregnancy. Even surrogate and adopted babies need someone to gestate them. Particularly in the United States, we don’t always recognize that enough.Along with Liberia and Papua New Guinea, we are one of the few countries that doesn’t offer paid maternity leave.The unpaid leave we do offer only covers women who work for companies that have fifty or more employees and whohave been at those companies for more than a year.
Even if you have an understanding employer who provides adequate leave, pregnancy can still throw you—and your career—for a loop. I remember, when I was teaching at Harvard Law School, one of my younger colleagues announced that she was planning to take a two-week maternity leave, much as Marissa Mayer did when she became CEO of Yahoo seven months into a pregnancy. In both cases I thought to myself,
I certainly hope everything goes smoothly, but clearly this is your first pregnancy!
What about an unexpected Cesarean section, as happened with my first son? Or other complications? My experience with our second son,who was born three weeks early, shows that even with the very best medical care available it is still possible to have medical problems that can land you in bed for nearly a month. Virtually every mother I know has a similar story about what she didn’t expect when she was expecting.
All that said, after pregnancy, birth, and breast-feeding, nothing a mother does can’t be done equally well by a father (and plenty of fathers bottle-feed breast milk to their babies). Yet the stereotypes and cultural expectations about mothers remain out-sized when compared to the expectations about fathers, even as we try to challenge them. No one wrote a book called
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Father
. No one wrote a book called
Perfect Madness: Fatherhood in the Age of Anxiety
talking about the unrealistic expectations suddenly placed on fathers. No one developed a theory of good-enough fathering, telling dads they did not need to be perfect parents to create thriving children.
The Oscar-winning movie
Kramer vs. Kramer
addressed exactly this issue. The movie opens with Meryl Streep as a beautiful young mother sitting by the bedside of her six-year-old son, Billy, steeling herself to leave him and divorce his father, played by Dustin Hoffman. At the outset of the movie, Hoffman’s character, a successful ad executive, is so preoccupied with work he doesn’t know what grade his son is in. But over time as a single parent, Hoffman learns to be a fully engaged dad and takes a less stressful job. Streep’s character returns after this evolution and after a nasty custody battle is awarded custody of Billy. Even though she abandoned him completely, the judge believes that the child is best raised by his mother. (Ultimately, Streep gives the child back to his dad, realizing that he’s better off with Hoffman.)
Kramer vs. Kramer
came out in 1979, more than thirty-five years ago. But astonishingly, in light of the tens of millions of divorcessince and substantial changes in the custody laws, we are still clinging to and having to combat the deep assumption that a mother’s love and care are somehow better and more essential than a father’s, even when that father has time and energy that the mother does not.
And really, what are we to say to gay fathers, if it is only mothers who matter? Despite the fact that numerous studies have shown thatchildren raised by gay parents are just as well-adjusted as children raised by straight parents, our culture hasn’t caught up with these truths.Frank Ligtvoet, a gay dad, wrote a moving essay in
The New York Times
about his experience raising a daughter and a son with his partner. Ligtvoet’s children were adopted in an open
The one time children genuinely cannot do without their biological mothers is during pregnancy. Even surrogate and adopted babies need someone to gestate them. Particularly in the United States, we don’t always recognize that enough.Along with Liberia and Papua New Guinea, we are one of the few countries that doesn’t offer paid maternity leave.The unpaid leave we do offer only covers women who work for companies that have fifty or more employees and whohave been at those companies for more than a year.
Even if you have an understanding employer who provides adequate leave, pregnancy can still throw you—and your career—for a loop. I remember, when I was teaching at Harvard Law School, one of my younger colleagues announced that she was planning to take a two-week maternity leave, much as Marissa Mayer did when she became CEO of Yahoo seven months into a pregnancy. In both cases I thought to myself,
I certainly hope everything goes smoothly, but clearly this is your first pregnancy!
What about an unexpected Cesarean section, as happened with my first son? Or other complications? My experience with our second son,who was born three weeks early, shows that even with the very best medical care available it is still possible to have medical problems that can land you in bed for nearly a month. Virtually every mother I know has a similar story about what she didn’t expect when she was expecting.
All that said, after pregnancy, birth, and breast-feeding, nothing a mother does can’t be done equally well by a father (and plenty of fathers bottle-feed breast milk to their babies). Yet the stereotypes and cultural expectations about mothers remain out-sized when compared to the expectations about fathers, even as we try to challenge them. No one wrote a book called
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Father
. No one wrote a book called
Perfect Madness: Fatherhood in the Age of Anxiety
talking about the unrealistic expectations suddenly placed on fathers. No one developed a theory of good-enough fathering, telling dads they did not need to be perfect parents to create thriving children.
The Oscar-winning movie
Kramer vs. Kramer
addressed exactly this issue. The movie opens with Meryl Streep as a beautiful young mother sitting by the bedside of her six-year-old son, Billy, steeling herself to leave him and divorce his father, played by Dustin Hoffman. At the outset of the movie, Hoffman’s character, a successful ad executive, is so preoccupied with work he doesn’t know what grade his son is in. But over time as a single parent, Hoffman learns to be a fully engaged dad and takes a less stressful job. Streep’s character returns after this evolution and after a nasty custody battle is awarded custody of Billy. Even though she abandoned him completely, the judge believes that the child is best raised by his mother. (Ultimately, Streep gives the child back to his dad, realizing that he’s better off with Hoffman.)
Kramer vs. Kramer
came out in 1979, more than thirty-five years ago. But astonishingly, in light of the tens of millions of divorcessince and substantial changes in the custody laws, we are still clinging to and having to combat the deep assumption that a mother’s love and care are somehow better and more essential than a father’s, even when that father has time and energy that the mother does not.
And really, what are we to say to gay fathers, if it is only mothers who matter? Despite the fact that numerous studies have shown thatchildren raised by gay parents are just as well-adjusted as children raised by straight parents, our culture hasn’t caught up with these truths.Frank Ligtvoet, a gay dad, wrote a moving essay in
The New York Times
about his experience raising a daughter and a son with his partner. Ligtvoet’s children were adopted in an open
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