This article in today’s Associated Press (and picked us by USA Today, MSNBC, the International Herald Tribune and scads of local news sources) talks about mothers who have been laid off using the opportunity to spend more time with their kids.
Innocuous on its surface, the piece suggests that working mothers are disconnected from their children’s lives. It profiles a mother who couldn’t locate her child’s classroom, didn’t know the rules for the playroom in their building and wasn’t familiar with the nurses at her pediatrician’s office.
I bristle at the implicit message that layoffs are somehow “good” for kids and their mothers. Even the relatively privileged women in the article are nervous about their futures. I suspect that the bulk of parents who are experiencing layoffs do not see extra family time as a “fringe benefit” as one iteration of the article put it. They are worrying about healthcare, education and good housing. And since only a portion of the laid off women will find new jobs, many of them not as good as their previous positions, there are long-run costs that are exponential to the immediate impact.
Over the past few years we’ve seen a lot of stories about high-powered working women opting out of the corporate world, a phenomenon that has been disproportionately represented in the media, and turns out to involve a relatively small group of women. The AP story smacks of the same kind of journalism — reporting on wealthy people who have the luxury of taking time off — rather than focusing on the core issues that are facing a majority of Americans.
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MomaBee- I think you’re letting this article and its AP writer get off a bit easy on this one. Not only is the article (and its iterations) classist, in that it focuses on the impact of layoffs on a privileged wealthier group, but also it’s more than a little bit sexist, and maybe even misogynist… (big accusation, I know, but hear me out…) ..
Why did the article need to portray women who previously worked outside the home as so disconnected from their kids’ lives that these moms didn’t know some basic elements of their kids’ days? The implicit criticism is that the mom was too wrapped up in her “career” (a privilege) to care about her children ….
And how about laid off dads? Do they have some special connection to their kids days that they find the classrooms the first time and intuit all the playroom rules?
And, are knowing these things valid indicators of the degree to which a mom loves her kids and her kids feel loved?
(I still can’t make my way around my daughters’ school without asking for directions … and there is no question that I love them. And I work (only) part time.)
I cringe, too, at the element in this and other stories of ‘these women are getting their comeuppance’.
Grrrr. cvh
The WSJ ran a story on the flip side yesterday that similarly raised my working-mother hackles. The theme of the Journal’s article was that women are being forced to return to work by the sinking economy, instead of taking “multi-year maternity leaves.” First of all, if you’re out for several years, that’s not really a maternity leave. Second of all, the whole tone of the article was that women should not work unless they absolutely must, out of economic necessity, and that it is just terrible when that happens. The article profiled a well-educated mother of four, most of whom were at least preschool-aged, who had to go back to work when her family was reduced to subsisting on food stamps. Why on earth would you wait until the point where your family won’t have enough to eat before you think about looking for a job?
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