Prioritizing Parenthood

On Monday, there was an article in The New York Times about how, despite best attempts, there is still a great deal of gender inequity among MIT professors (“Gains, and Drawbacks, for Female Professors“).

There were many interesting points in the article, but one thing stuck out to me:

Administrators say some men use family leave to do outside work, instead of to be their children’s primary care giver — creating more professional inequity.

I thought at first, well, maybe another parent is staying home as the primary caregiver (like a mom, maybe) and the dad is home to help out. I know that I wished my husband had had the option of family leave after our children were born, not to be the kids’ primary caregiver, but to be my primary caregiver (feeding and bathing myself were real challenges those first couple of months). But from comments elsewhere, it sounds like some dads actually take the family leave and have full-time childcare for their children at the same time. Do the dads who use family leave with no intention of actually spending time with their families do it because they think they, as parents, are unnecessary? Do they think that a day care or a nanny can do just as well as (or better than) they can? Are they afraid to try to care for their own children?

While this article is about the inequalities between male and female scientists and engineers, it’s also about how we feel about families and parents’ roles within their families. It’s not about men and women (except in the sense that traditionally parenting has been seen as female and career has been seen as male, and we have to deal with those stereotypes). It’s about families and where we place families in the hierarchy of “important things” in our culture. A parent who uses the arrival of a new family member as an excuse to take time off to really work on their publications isn’t putting “family” very high on their list of priorities.

I’m a stay-at-home parent. Here’s my bias: Children need their parents, especially between birth and age two when so much of their view of the world and their connection with other people is developing.

I do define “parent” loosely. For me, a parent is a consistent, loving presence who provides a primary secure attachment for a child. This can be a biological parent, an adoptive parent, a foster parent, a step-parent, a grandparent, an aunt or uncle, really anyone so long as they’re a consistent, loving presence. I don’t think it can be a hired caregiver. Or rather, I don’t think that it should be a hired caregiver. Hired caregivers may love our children like crazy, but they are still employees. They are being paid to be with our kids. They can quit that job. They can move away. We can fire them. Sometimes we’re paying them to be with our kids instead of being with their own. No matter how wonderful a hired caregiver is, she’s not a replacement for a parent.

It seems like our culture, by and large, disagrees with me on this. Even when our babies are newborns, we say six weeks is really all they need with their parents. This doesn’t make sense from an emotional, psychological, or biological standpoint. We are born helpless. We need our parents constantly from those first moments until we no longer need to nurse every couple of hours (which puts you about at the beginning of the second year or later). (For more about the needs of babies from an anthropologist’s perspective, check out Our Babies Ourselves by Meredith Small.)

But in our culture, the idea is that a nanny or a day care is just as good as—if not better than—a parent, even from just a few weeks after birth. And then as soon as our kids hit two or three years old, we’re supposed to leave their parenting to preschools, then kindergartens, and on up the ladder until we wonder where our children’s childhoods went. We only spent six weeks with them. No wonder we can’t figure out where the time went.

Yes, it can be a financial luxury for a parent to stay home with their child. But we figure in lots of other financial costs before we decide to start a family.

If we truly valued families, if we truly valued children, we wouldn’t consider spending time with them to be a luxury, and we would budget that in the same as we’d budget in saving for college or paying for music lessons (or hiring childcare). If we truly valued families, we would value our role as parents, and we would demand that others value the parental role as well. We are not interchangeable with the day care center or the nanny. And if we are, there is a problem.

I’ll pause here to say that I understand that shit happens. I’m not talking about people who’ve planned and planned and then something happens, like a divorce or a death or a job loss, that derails the whole master plan. I’m talking about those parents who actively make the choice to start a family with no intention of spending the majority of their time being parents to their children, even though they have the means and the freedom to do so.

And I’m not saying that one parent needs to put his or her career on hold to parent full-time. We simply need to put parenting higher on the list of priorities so that we can make the demands of our employers that are necessary to give us the flexibility to parent and to work on our careers. We and our colleagues need to recognize that we’re not “taking time off” to parent our children; we’re taking on an additional job. And that other job benefits society at least as much as the work we do in our careers. If we can’t do both at the same time we might simply have to choose which is more important to us and do them in sequence rather than both at the same time.

I love parents who stay home with their kids. I love parents who change their schedules so one parent is always with their children. I love parents who bring their infants to the office with them (yes, there are employers who “let” their employees spend time with their children at work). I love parents who stagger their family leave to maximize the amount of time they have to spend with their children. I love parents who arrange to work from home part time so they can spend more time with their families. I love parents who take family leave when a new baby enters their family even when their partner is planning to be the “primary caregiver” for the baby.

There’s not one right way for parents to be there for their kids. The bottom line is, someone needs to be there for that child, and that someone needs to be someone who loves that child and has a stake in their development and their emotional wellbeing. Even the best hired caregiver can’t—and shouldn’t for what they’re paid—be expected to have that level of involvement. It is imperative for parents to make it work to be with their kids. There’s nothing wrong with employing caregivers to help out. Parenting is a huge job, and we all need help. I just don’t think it makes sense to have a hired caregiver spend the majority of a child’s waking hours with her, especially if there’s a parent home on family leave who could be with their child but instead is working to get an edge in his career. Why have a child if the parents in her life are going to play a tiny role in comparison with the role a hired caregiver is going to play? (From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s a great plan to have someone else raise your offspring to maturity. It perpetuates your genes and frees you up to do other things. But if we’re talking about the evolutionary history of our species, chances are the other caregivers weren’t childcare professionals but were people who met the definition of “parent” I offer above.)

A child needs a primary secure attachment. This is important from a developmental perspective. If a parent is comfortable with the primary attachment being to a day care center worker or an au pair, so be it. But it does everyone a disservice for a parent to take parental leave presumably to, you know, parent, and then to instead use that time to do work while their kids develop a secure attachment with the nanny. It’s not fair to their employer, their coworkers, or to their children.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it might really be fear that keeps us from embracing the importance of our role as parents. Whether it’s fear of doing things differently than our peers, fear of dropping out of the social structure of our workplace, fear of being punished in our careers for taking time away, or fear of not being able to hack it as parents.

Children need their parents. And parents need their children. If we’re going to stand up for children, we need to stand up for parents. We need to admit how important parents are. How important we are. We don’t make parents less important by minimizing their importance. We simply cause them and their children to miss out.