Our society is turning stay-at-home moms into invisible women. Psychologist Brenda Hunter is not amused.
The Utne Reader, a kind of Reader’s Digest of the countercultural, “alternative” press, is not known for championing typically conservative causes. But a recent cover declared, “Mom and Dad are working, day care’s on the skids, our tots are strapped to latchkeys—Who Cares About the Kids?”
“If the Zoë Baird brouhaha showed us one thing,” one editor remarked, “it was how conflicted Americans still are about work and child rearing.”
That is especially true when it comes to moms. But Brenda Hunter, psychologist and specialist in infant attachment, believes that American society may encourage mothers who work, but it devalues mothers who don’t. Her book Home by Choice (Multnomah) has led to appearances on the Today show, Larry King Live, and Sally Jessy Raphaël. Her most recent book, What Every Mother Needs to Know (Multnomah), came out late last year. Here she discusses what fuels her convictions.
You argue in Home by Choice that our current cultural climate is hostile to “mother love.” What do you mean?
Our culture tells mothers they are not that important in their children’s lives. For three decades, mothering has been devalued in America. It has even become a status symbol for the modern woman to take as little time as possible away from work for full-time mothering.
I believe it started in the 1960s. We can’t blame everything on radical feminists, but some of them suggested that work in the office would take care of women’s angst. In the 1980s, we saw the emergence of the myth that anyone could care for a mother’s children as well as Mother herself. And in the 1990s, we hear that fathers are unnecessary, that children thrive in any family setting, whether it be homosexual or single-parent.
“Dan Quayle Was Right,” the much-discussed article in the Atlantic by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, stated that children do better in intact, two-parent families. Unfortunately, we’ve made it too costly psychologically for many women to take time out from careers and stay home with their child.
What kind of cost do you see?
The mother at home is either forgotten in the secular media or she is denigrated. This past Mother’s Day weekend, I read the Washington Post and USA Weekend, and most of the articles in one way or another put down the mother at home. On that day, at least one national daily chose to say that the mental health of housewives was poorer than the mental health of employed mothers. It’s not a happy image for mothers who are struggling with little kids.
Then why are more mothers staying home, as you point out in Home by Choice?
In 1990, for the first time since 1948, the number of women in the work force dropped. Also in 1990, the birth rate rose 10.5 percent from 1980. In 1990 the Roper Organization found that for the first time since 1980, the majority of women polled—51 percent—said they preferred to stay home. Poll after poll indicates that about two-thirds of mothers would prefer to spend more time home with their children if money were not a problem.
I’ve heard from mothers across America whose hearts are home even if their bodies are at the office. Some say, “I’m not home now but I will be in six months,” or “after my second child is born.” After I was on the Today show on a Saturday, over 100 mothers called, inquiring about working from home.
Don’t mothers find support in the church?
I hear younger women saying all the time, “Where are the older mothers? Grandma’s on a career track or on a cruise. Where is the kind of woman mentioned in Titus 2 who can help me with my life?”
Fortunately, some churches are starting mentoring programs. As a psychologist, I know that women are better wives and mothers if they have sufficient emotional support.
You argue that the issue is more than one of modeling or getting training in parenting techniques, but of healthy patterns of intimacy established in infancy. What do you mean?
The eminent British pyschiatrist John Bowlby believes that a baby’s emotional bond or attachment to his mother is the foundation stone of personality. If my parents are emotionally accessible and they love me, I feel loved and worthy. If not, I feel unloved and unworthy. That in turn affects my ability to be emotionally accessible to my children in adulthood.
But is maternal deprivation more damaging than paternal neglect?
That’s hard to answer. And I believe that mothers and fathers are equally important. I do not believe they are interchangeable. But I believe that mothers and fathers do different things for children. Children learn to be intimate primarily from their mothers in that early maternal relationship. Freud emphasized the singular importance of the mother or mother figure in the child’s early life as “unique, without parallel … as the prototype of all later love relationships for both sexes.” I believe that Mother is very much the architect of intimacy. Cross-culturally, infancy seems to belong to mothers.
What about the mother who feels emotionally unequipped for parenting? Is it better for the child for her to be home?
Women who stay home need to keep the intellectual life alive. I’m not trying to put people on a guilt trip. But I suggest that there are many things a mother who stays at home can do to thrive. If a mother is depressed at home, she may need to recognize that there is an absence of nurture in her past and work through this pain through psychotherapy or nurturing relationships with older women. Some in the mental health profession have discovered that older women can provide an invaluable resource to younger, struggling mothers. Why the church doesn’t do more with this is a mystery to me.
If children need accessible parents, when does that need stop?
Obviously children of school age need less time with their mothers than babies and children. That’s why I encourage women to develop their gifts at home. Lots of women go back to work. If they can have a full-time job that lets them off after school, great. I’m big on at-home careers; what I am against is the empty house. Children do not flourish in the empty house. I once heard an authority on teen pregnancy say that usually a girl has her first sexual experience in her or her boyfriend’s empty house.
Newsweek said there are some 10 million latchkey children in this country. I was a latchkey child. I know what it feels like. I know about the fear of the burglar. I used to look under the beds and check the closets every day when I came home. And I felt lonely. Having my mother telephone and say, “How are you?” helped, but a phone call is no substitute for a mother’s presence.
My girls were in high school when I went back to school for my doctorate. I had an experimental psychology lab late in the afternoon twice a week. I didn’t think my girls would notice. But I remember Holly—a high-school senior—commenting several times that she missed me. It was important for me to be there to talk to and have a cup of tea with my teens after school.
What’s at stake in all this?
We have to put it into a larger, cultural perspective. I recently reread Brave New World, and it was frightening. When we weaken attachments between parents and children, all kinds of anomalies occur, as Huxley showed. We’re headed there. In the book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe argue that the twentysomething generation has the highest incidence of maternal employment and parental divorce of any American generation. It’s also the most aborted generation. It has the highest rate of incarceration and the second-highest suicide rate. Moreover, I believe we already have a daycare generation among us, and we’re working on another.
So I appeal to parents and churches and ask, What about the children? In our career pursuits—mothers and fathers—let’s not forget them. Our lifestyles as mothers may have changed, but our children’s needs are the same.
By Jill Zook-Jones, a homemaker and freelance writer in Carol Stream, Illinois.
