...to think that Mothers and Fathers are Equal but Different?

[CSLewis]

I posted this at the end of another thread with a slightly different focus, so will re-post here: I was struck by the assumption that 'equality' means 'sameness'; that being a mother is no different from being a father; that 'parenting' is the same whether being done by the mother or father.

I disagree with all these assumptions. That does not mean that I don't think that mothers and fathers have equally important roles to play in the upbringing of their children: it does mean that I think those roles are different, because men and women are different. And I think that a child's mother is uniquely suited to being the primary carer of her child. This website is not called "Person-Net" for a reason.

I know I'm going to be accused of being gender-deterministic, or of vilifying mothers who return to work and leave their babies with professional childminders. This is not my intention at all; however, I do believe that it minimises the importance of the maternal bond - and therefore of women - to state that if a baby's physical needs are being met by a competent, or even caring, child-care professional, then this is qualitatively the same as that baby being cared for by its mother, or father, or other personally, consistently 'attached' adult.

I think a whole generation of women have believed the lie that they are not equal to men unless they are financially independent; that they have little value, or right to respect, unless they are contributing to the economy directly via the workforce.

In order to be happy with their new role as "same-as-men",women have then had to be convinced that their babies are just as well-off in child-care as with them. Does anyone on here really believe that? That a child-care professional is as good as a mother? And if they don't believe that, how has it happened that women end up in a position where they are forced to sacrifice their child's welfare for the sake of their own financial independence?

That was a rhetorical question; I really don't believe that a mother would deliberately make a choice she thought was detrimental to her child if there were other alternatives available; but the whole set-up of society now makes it very difficult to support a family, let alone own a home, unless both parents are working. And if both parents work, their children are in child-care. And in order to justify that 'necessity', women need to convince themselves that qualitatively their children are no worse off than if they were at home, being cared for by a parent (preferably, according to a few thousand years of evolution, their mother). And by accepting that bit of double-think, they devalue and do themselves out of the most important job any human being has ever had to do in the history of the world: raising the next generation of humankind. And our government is perpetuating that double-think by constantly pressuring women to return to work so that they can also provide a job for whoever will be looking after their children.

Apologies for the rant. Apologies to all whose I've just offended. Not my intention.

Oh, and since when can you not work and BF?! I went back to work at 6m (exclusively BF til then) and BF DS to 15m, when I chose to wean him.

The aim of businesses is to make as much profit as possible, yes, but we haven't allowed that to prevent the introduction of health and safety and workers rights. Women's rights should take no lesser status.

Businesses are run by people, not automatons, and plenty of business owners have a basic level of humanity that would be willing to negotiate a fairer way of working for parents. Those who don't are not very nice people, and dress it up as much as we want about a duty to shareholders to maximise profits, etc., the ugly truth is that such behaviour actually makes for a worse society, not a better one. Fairer societies are more economically productive.

This is going to be another sahp vs wohp debate, isn't it? I keep wanting to post, but I won't because I said my bit on the other thread and I'm too flu-ridden to get embroiled in discussion.

but CS you are placing this all at the door of the mother. What needs to happen is that society need to value parenting and provide proper resources to allow both parents to look after the children and be fulfilled personally through their work. Until that happens with more equal paternity/maternity leave then the situation we are in will continue.

And you do know that you can have a career without devoting every hour of the week to it. You don't need to delegate full parental responsibility to go out to work you know

erm. Yeah. We do.

We have reproductive urges
We have the instinct to protect our young
We have survival instincts
We have fight or flight response
We exhibit pack behaviour (ever been to a football match?)
etc etc
And there are ways other animals are like us - there are other animals that use tools, for example

HTH

If mothers defended their role better (rather than using all their energy trying to be gender-neutral economic agents) they might get a better deal from society.

I really don't believe that a mother would deliberately make a choice she thought was detrimental to her child if there were other alternatives available

There seems to be a lot of evidence that mothers and fathers with every type of parental link to their child do not always put their child's interests first.

You seem to be trying to draw a big conclusion about gender based on a highly selected sample.

Also I'm afraid I have to disagree with your assertion about equality. I agree completely that respecting all people including differences is a noble ideal but it doesn't seem factual to me to assert universal equality exists, other than as an ideal.

I am splitting hairs I expect and while I disagree strongly with your reasoning I respect your very considered approach to these matters.

Are you unreasonable to think that mothers and fathers are equal but different, CSLewis? No. But in my mind, this isn't really in dispute as every person is different from each other. Among the people I know, the women and men play a variety of different roles and have different strengths. This is less determined by their gender and more by their personalities. To me, it is simply that both 'parents' have different strengths.

For example, one of my strengths was being able to breastfeed. My DH could not do that. That is a parenting difference determined by gender. There are other differences and similarities between us that have nothing to do with gender: we are both cuddly, neither of us shout at DS, one of us is much more practical and will notice when sheets need changing (my DH), one of us is much, much sillier (me)...and so on.

I'm less clear what this all has to do with whether someone stays at home to care for children or works. Do I think I'm the best carer for my child? Yes. And that's lucky because indeed I am the one who is there stroking his head at night or getting up with him when he's sick and singing him songs at 4am.

Do I think I'm the only possible carer for some of the time? No. That's why I can live with him going to childcare. He does things that I don't do with him - eg plays on trikes, shares with other children of different ages, cooking etc. At home, I do other things - reading, playing imaginative games etc. Childcare is one bit of my DS' life experience, it certainly isn't all of it.

I don't think women working minimises the maternal role. My having a career does not mean I am less important to my son. Does it compromise me in the eyes of my employer? Well, they keep promoting me, so I can't believe that is always the case. Sometimes it is difficult to balance things and sometimes I feel very happy and lucky that I get to do something I find really interesting for work and have a family too.

You also imply that women can't breastfeed long term and work, saying this is a talking about the value of breastfeeding is taboo. But it does not naturally follow that you can't mix work and breastfeeding, does it? I breastfed my son into toddlerhood, regardless of working full time. I didn't deny the biological part of motherhood just because I needed to contribute economically to my home.

Something I agree with you on is the value of raising children. I think raising children is of great value. I think people who raise children should be treated with great respect and of course I understand why women with MBAs and PHDs choose to stay at home rather than work out of the home. I'd understand the same to be true for fathers.

For me, the issue is that since in this day and age, women like me can actually be the breadwinners or often both parents do realistically need to work to pay their bills, how can we ensure ALL childcare is high quality? I don't think that once a generation of women like me have grown up believing they can have both a satisfying career and family life, the woman-stays-at-home option is the only one.

But as I said before, I think all people are different so I think you need different options available to them.

.."Saying this is a talking about the value of breastfeeding..."

I meant: "...saying talking about the value of breastfeeding is taboo".

" No. But in my mind, this isn't really in dispute as every person is different from each other"

Yes, yes. I meant to say this. Of course me and my DH are different - I just don't think our differences are at all to do with our genders.

IME people who write posts like this move in social circles full of people very similar to themselves (socially, culturally etc) but erroneously assume they are representative of everyone.

Ah, well, can't expect business to compromise its aims in any way, can we? Like I said, only the pesky women, the human beings whose happiness and fulfilment are clearly less important than increasing profits for someone, somewhere.

The whole corporate social responsibility agenda has ramped up massively in the last 15 years in particular to show the flaws in this Friedmanesque notion about business. But if someone just doesn't believe women are important enough to assert their own rights to happiness, and that we should all be championing the notion that they belong at home looking after the kids, then they are unlikely ever to take that on board. I can't see my position changing either. I am happy for women who choose, genuinely choose, to be SAHPs to do it but I never want to see it held up as some kind of duty we're letting down the entire species in if we diverge from. I simply don't believe that and never will.

The 'women themselves have to show the value of the child-raising role' to me also seems like a circular argument. How are an already under-valued, low-status group going to make people listen to them? Are women in career jobs supposed to campaign for those jobs to be taken away from them or made harder for them to do?

I'm pretty sure YABU, and just trying to start a bun fight despite your pleas of innocence, because your argument seems to completely change in the course of your post.

You start of by saying mums and dads are equal but different and mums are uniquely positioned to be primary carers for their children. But go on to back that up with views based on mums going back to work and using childcare to look after their children - not fathers. I don't really see anything in what you've posted that backs up the idea dads couldn't be equally good primary carers if society didn't push them away from the role in a million subtle and not so subtle ways.

OP I agree with your opening post completely. Still thinking about the fathers issue.

I think that if men and women were "equal" parents, men would be fighting with women up and down the country, to be the stay at home parent.
And , on the whole, they are not.

Astr0naut yep it is. Lots of talk about empowering women while actually setting us all against one another for not agreeing to do everything in exactly the same way.

It?s a taboo subject to an extent. It?s not acceptable to question motherhood and what it really means. Even on here, the threads where posters explore whether motherhood really brought value to their lives, whether it gave their lives validity, whether it was the only means to truly and fully experience what it means to be a woman, are answered cautiously and women are commended for being brave enough to admit this or treated with pity.

If we give fatherhood the same value, do we diminish motherhood at a time when women are already diminished in all other areas ? Do women cling to the role because it?s the only one assigned to us as ours and ours alone ? Or do we do so because we?re conditioned to accept that role and conditioned to believing that anything else makes us a bad woman ? Because it suits a patriarchial society for women to be held to this role ?

Why don?t we judge fathers by the same standards ? It seems to be the only area where men are prepared to allow women to have power over them but it strikes me that if men have chosen to give women that power, it?s because it suits them and guess what, who benefits most from women being deemed the suitable carer ? Oh?.that would be men. Despite the damage it does to them as fathers and the concept of fatherhood.

I do think that there?s an argument that by fusing our identities so entirely with that of ?mother?, we leave ourselves open to disappointment in later years when that role lessens in a practical sense, that we raise children who have been so conditioned to expect that the world revolves around them and their small family unit that we lose our sense of society because we?re not allowing children to be raised by the village.

I think a father could do as good a job as a mother though - talking about early years here. Just, one of the parents should be at home with the kids or at least a lot of the time. I really think hardly anyone prefers to hand over their kids to nurseries. If they truly had the choice.

I may be totally wrong. And I have days whenI just want to be at work, and I'm not. But that was a choice I made when I had the children - for now, they're my work, I can't do both, not enough brain capacity to share it out. I have to focus on one or the other. So of course work is jacked in for the time being.

and if they had a dad to be at home with them I'd gladly go out to work - if it meant both of us had to go to work though, I'd not want that.

Yes, universal equality absolutely is an ideal, but I think it's one worth striving for, and a lot of energy seems to be diverted into what I think is a misguided effort for 'sameness' of rights and responsibilities, rather than equal value being accorded to differing roles and responsibilities. And no, I absolutely don't think that this is all women's responsibility to effect; I would hope that many men would agree, but they'd need to be pretty brave to voice such opinions in the current climate, wouldn't they?!

I do think it would be helpful to all concerned to clarify just what is at stake, and what the implications are, of the current drive towards 'equality', and the effect that this drive has had on our assumptions and aspirations as women. While the sound-bites and headlines appear very appealing, I think some very basic beliefs and values, which have underpinned 'civilisation' for millennia, are being flushed down the toilet, and this worries me.

If us women can't agree that we are the optimum choice for raising our kids, then maybe we aren't?

Some women may be the optimum choice for raising kids (either their own or other people's) and so might some men. But I enjoy working and I think my own DD does better to have a small number of people caring for her rather than just me.

Well I disagree completely OP.

My DP does a fantastic job with bringing up our child. I am the one who works in our household, and our son sees him much more than me. Right from the word go his bond has been very very strong with both of us. When I am off (and I'm off for a bit now as I'm on mat leave), he gets to spend quality time with both of us together. But I didn't doubt for one minute he'd be able to do a brilliant job bringing our boy up.

He is his father, not a babysitter.

"In an equal relationship between two adults, both of whom valued the other's role and input, there would also be equal access to that family's money. "

Right. But the key word here is "would". It is apparent by your use of the subjunctive that even you know you are talking about a potential, hypothetical state of affairs.
You only need to read a few threads on here to know that the way it works is that if men earn and women don't, men can choose to recognise their wives' moral equal right to the money, or not. They have no actual right to it (unless they divorce) (possession being 9 points of the law)

A lot of men are very nice and reasonable. But that is not enough. I am always staggered by this "love will make it ok" approach to power imbalances and the potential for corruption and abuse. No other system works like this. If you volunteer to count the money at church, there will be procedures about how it is checked, who is in the room at any time, etc. Same if you work in a bank. Regulations and checks apply to working with children. The majority of people are decent, but it is known that temptation exists, and steps are taken for safeguarding the money, the child, the whatever.
Yet somehow, checks like this don?t traditionally apply in marriages* where one partner earns and the other SAHPs, but has no direct access to money. Why? Why this bizarre oversight? Could it be that ? they don?t WANT women (it is traditionally the woman who SAHPs) to be free to stand up for themselves if they are treated like shit?

OP, I wish households could afford SAHPs, (if they want to), but traditional roles are not the way to do things.

*actually increasingly they do, and this is a good thing, and is part of new flexible approaches to roles and duties that the OP seems to be decrying

OP, what would you actually do to bring your ideal state about?
How would society look? What laws / incentives would apply? how would people live?

"You only need to read a few threads on here to know that the way it works is that if men earn and women don't, men can choose to recognise their wives' moral equal right to the money, or not. They have no actual right to it."

Indeed, and this is a very critical issue.

I'd see it more as an attempt to get equality of opportunity. I'm currenty a SAHM. Honestly I'm beginning to wish I hadn't had kids. I love them and don't regret them. But I don't feel at all suited to this life. I don't think I'm particularly good at it, I think my DH would be better, and I think probably a paid carer who saw childcare as a vocation would be better.

I don't think that's sameness - it's recognizing that not only are all humans not the same, but not all women are the same and not all men are the same. And they should have as much freedom as possible to be able to make arrangements that suit well.