21st Society Feminists Should Reconceive Parenting as a Societal and Professional Asset

Bringing up bébé by Pamela Druckerman is all the rage.  It’s about how “one American mother discovers the wisdom of French parenting”, the secret behind how “the French manage to raise astonishingly well-behaved children,” all while having a life, too.  

I can see the attraction – it always seems exciting when we’re on the verge of learning a foolproof success recipe for something as bewildering and experimental as raising children.

Frankly, Druckerman’s gross generalizations don’t really fit with my personal experience, American with 2 young children being raised in France.  Nor do they match my personal analysis:   as different cultures clearly have their assets on either side of the Atlantic… the strengths of being brought up in one or the other are tightly linked to the cultural realities of each country (historical, geographical, social, religious, etc) with all the positive… and negative…. aspects  and consequences of those realities when it comes to parenting.

But that’s not the debate I want to have here.

What comes to my mind as I read about Druckerman’s “Bébé” has more to do with the premise of superiority.  It’s a major ailment within our competitive performance society.  Instead of more pragmatically and constructively seeing how an individual with his and her personal priorities decides to compose with all this input, our obsession is for the Perfection of it, for our own Perfection in doing it Perfectly. .. and we link it to making the Perfect woman.

But parenting is far more relative.  And so is being a woman. 

Unfortunately, many analyses these days aren’t helping the matter and tend to divide us up and peg us down into superlatives:

·         the stay-at-home moms who have given up their bright career to raise their children, finding themselves living vicariously through the children and managing powerplay between moms via creative playgroups and perfected birthday parties, so well described by Judith Warner in her work, “Perfect Madness”

·         the in-between women who work shorter hours / part time to have a hand in raising their children and who are dismissed for their inability to do either well enough, as profiled by Elizabeth Badinter in her work, “Conflict: mother, woman”

·         the career women who escaped the patriarchal claws of “choice feminism” and who never have children or who have 1 child raised by someone else in order to access power and status, as prescribed by Linda Hirshman in her work, “Get to Work”.

These caricatured divisions anger me.  It’s not that I don’t smell some smoke; the intelligent women who did this research each have valid points in their diagnostics.  And it’s clear:  we still haven’t figured out how to comfortably “Have it All”.   But the sidelining is damaging in a number of ways:

• It risks confirming executives can’t be good pro’s if they have children, giving fodder to the discrimination against women on the job (note that in France, known for all the State-led initiatives to help women work more easily and have good care for their children, Bamboo Conseil, consulting firm in management and personal development, has calculated that a child’s arrival generates an 11% gap in women’s careers, a lag that is difficult to make up).
• It comforts the idea that family has no place in our “public” sphere, including the professional sphere.
• It reiterates that family, “care”, home economics merit no value and should be considered only as a burden.

For me, we need to tackle these issues differently.

1.  We should tap into the underestimated value of children / family in professionals’ lives.

Having children as a professional is generally represented for its negative stereotypes:  exhaustion, too much juggling, sick-leave, a less dedicated professional, etc.

That’s not the reality of the story at all.  And it’s time we (including feminists like the authors cited above) start having the real story be heard.

Raising children renews our learning curves, stimulates us to questioning our presumptions, pushes us to find new and/or alternative solutions… all important skills that are also leveraged on the job.  Having and caring for children kindles empathy and the art of putting oneself in another’s shoes to be able, again, to find more pertinent solutions and improve work efficiency (especially in marketing, communications, sales, and management).  Building a family and balancing career/family ensures flexible/agile organizational skills which, again, can improve professional performance. 
And, even more importantly, children represent a pull of gravity toward other things.  It helps tired professionals resource themselves either thanks to imposed “breaks” from work, offer fresh insight into topics (se changer les idées) and/or refresh the professional’s outlook (avoir plusieurs terrains de jeu and/or bring a little relativity if ever things aren’t going so well at work).  This added-value of child raising can help improve quality of work and can buffer from burn-out.   For so long, we have pinpointed the problem and the unfairness of the “second shift”… let’s get some benefits out of this additional “work” experience!

I’m not trying to say every single woman / family should have children.  That is choice.  I’m saying that those of us who decide to have children bring new added-value that is usually used against us.

2.  We should tap into the underestimated value of child-rearing in society.

Beyond the arguments above, I would also like to impress upon us the importance of child-rearing (I make a difference between child-rearing and simply bearing children whose education is entirely outsourced)… including among our top decision-makers in both the public and private sectors… has on society as a whole. 

Short-term vs. long-term relativity, comprehension of others, desire to build / be constructive, renewed attention to discovery, recycled and renewable love often inherent in child bearing and raising… without mentioning the mirth… are all qualitative aspects of raising children which are often ignored but which can actually help gain time and efficiency in our professional work and build a society in which we build with cooperation instead of destroying with competition, we innovate with love instead of stagnating with rivalry.

3.  We should bolster the value of transmission to collective progress

When we transmit our knowledge in culture, two things happen:  the person being initiated learns… but also questions in new ways/ differently from the presumptions formerly internalized by the initiated / initiator.  In turn, the initiated learns from these questions / new perspective and can even join with the newly initiated to weed out what to maintain and what to improve, and move beyond the clashes of culture we’re witnessing a little all over the world right now between past and present (just consider the Republic primaries in the US and some candidates’ pitch to return to 1950s values, turning their backs on progress, future potential, and human flourishing) and the pseudo conflict within companies worried about the clash of generations.

4.  We should renew the demand that family NOT weigh only on mothers’/women’s shoulders and work away from the nuclear family (key to performance society) towards the concept of “it takes a village”.

Just as women should be able to take advantage of the added-value in child-raising, so should men (and they increasingly are).  We should all be responsible in raising future generations and benefiting from what our interaction can gain for us individually, societally, and even competitively (when it comes to the professional sphere, as noted in point 1). 

In France, for example, free public schools with fine, trained teachers welcome children starting at the age of 3.  “School” is of course a big word for the children have nap time and play time in addition to arts, crafts, singing, story time, etc.  I used to think of this as a convenient, free “day care” for children whose parents worked… but I now espouse the idea as of utmost societal value.  It seems to me absolutely critical that children receive love and education from their parents… but also that they diversify their sources of interaction and learning.  They’re also given the space to resolve some of their own quarrels (vs. parachute parents) and build their resilience, crucial to surviving in today’s world. 

Further, we must facilitate men’s implication in this education.  In the book Jocast’s Children, Christiane Olivier’s analysis postulates that girls can better build confidence and be less beholden to “hyper-sexualisation” if they’ve had a chance to interact more with their father, including at puberty.  Today, many families don’t have a “father”.  But this building oneself vs. the “other” (l’alterité) can be supported by fostering more male teachers – including in elementary and pre schools – so that children have more male and female role models outside the home. 

The point here is that family should be carried by society rather than being uniquely nuclear-based.  This would free up women to work without fearing they are “bad mothers” or their children “abandoned”.  Further, it would free children from our own personal neuroses and/or the crushing pressure we may be putting on their shoulders for vicarious fulfillment and/or anxieties. 

These are some of my thoughts that are, of course, to be improved.  But I am convinced that a key to enabling women’s… and men’s… and future generations’ fulfillment is to stop making family quite so personal and allow it to be a rich societal asset.

Let me know what you think!  Then, talk to you next week, for another bite from the apple.