The pandemic, with its shutdowns and kids home from school, is hitting working mothers hard. When kids are home, the burden falls on women in the vast majority of families, and many women are being forced to scale back at work, leave their jobs, or take on serious new stresses. It’s something that many experts warn could be a generational setback for women in the workforce. So here comes The Wall Street Journal with a piece of rage-bait about how this is all so great for women, children, and employers.
Erica Komisar, described as a New York psychoanalyst and the author of Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters (in case there was any doubt about where she’s coming from), is apparently not living in the same reality I or anyone else I know or have read about is living in. Her take is that this is a lovely development because women wanted to be home with their kids anyway but their employers wouldn’t let them work from home and now everyone is working from home and employers find that “the cost savings have been immense” and the benefits for families—well! Those are worth going on about at some completely divorced-from-reality length.
Komisar is obviously not talking about the parents—well, the mothers, since she’s not really talking about fathers at all—who are faced with the choice between going to unsafe jobs in grocery stores or schools or restaurants or nursing homes or meatpacking plants and being unable to pay the bills. Or about the mothers who have gone from counting every penny as they waited for their unemployment checks to arrive to worrying that the Senate won’t agree to extend the expanded unemployment insurance. Those people don’t appear in Komisar’s piece. Perhaps they don’t enter her mind at all. They probably can’t afford New York psychoanalysts.
But as someone who is likely privileged enough to at least register as a real person to Komisar, let me say that her piece is absolute offensive nonsense when placed against the reality of my life and those of my friends. I have a great job (thanks, Markos!) with ample vacation time and benefits. My husband is a ridiculously overpaid lawyer. Until the pandemic, my son was in daycare for about 40 hours a week—because while I work from home, it was obviously a nonstarter to try to work while caring for a child. It would have been unfair to my child, my employer, my coworkers and, incidentally, myself.
Now? I have a paid caregiver for about 15 hours a week. My mother-in-law is a substantial help with childcare. It’s a powerful combination of privilege and luck helping us survive the stresses of the pandemic, but what it is not is anything like Komisar’s picture of mothering while working from home. I do not know anyone who is experiencing that.
“When new mothers can work from home, they are able to focus on their work without feeling torn from their children,” she writes. I am no longer a brand-new mother but I am here to say that one of the happiest moments of my son’s first six months was when my husband called to say we’d gotten in off the daycare wait list. Because you know what? Motherhood is not my all-consuming identity and having a child at home makes it difficult to focus on your work! That remains very true four years later. Who can focus on their work with kids demanding their attention?
“They can take breaks to feed, comfort and play with their children,” she continues. Yeah, and what every parent wants is for their breaks to come unpredictably every few minutes, disrupting any possibility of flow in their work, and for all breaks to be spent tending to the needs of others. I know it’s extremely helpful to me when I’m trying to write about unemployment or Black Lives Matter protests or elections and a small person climbs on top of me, elbows and knees digging in at every possible opportunity, and thrusts a Kindle in my face with a request for help with a game. (And let’s face it, screen time is both an invaluable caregiver and an enormous source of guilt these days.) In those moments, despite having a flexible and accommodating employer, I am not thinking “Yay, what a valuable opportunity to take a break from my work.”
“Without a long commute, they have more restorative time for themselves,” Komisar writes. Except that all their non-work time is for their children! It may be nice to be out of crowded subways or off of crowded highways, but it is not exactly “time for themselves,” thank you very much. “As a result, parents have more patience, and are less resentful towards their children.” Again, I would refer you to the elbow-in-gut-Kindle-in-face moments. Or to the fact that simply going out for a walk alone is a negotiation between my work schedule and my husband’s work schedule and our feeling that our son should not always be playing Kindle games. Or to the fact that the uncertainties of pandemic life and being cut off from our social circles is not making anyone more relaxed and patient.
Restorative time for myself? Maybe Komisar envisions us doing yoga, and somehow imagines that will happen without a downward dog turning into a horsey ride.
“Children, who read and mirror parents’ emotional cues, are less stressed, suffer less separation anxiety, aren’t angry at their parents for being away at work, and learn to regulate their emotions—all of which has lifelong benefits.” This is almost hilarious in a laughing-while-you-cry kind of way, but primarily it’s outrageous coming from someone who purports to be any kind of expert on what’s good for children. Because I assure you that children are not less stressed during a pandemic. They are not less stressed being pulled out of their daycares and schools and daily routines. They are not less stressed being told that the fun activities they once looked forward to are now off limits because of the life-threatening sickness the museum or the birthday party could expose us to.
Lots of kids are not, in general, angry at their parents for being away at work, but in this time they do miss their school friends and teachers and routines.
And reading and mirroring parents’ emotional cues is not going to make children less stressed, either. Whether it’s being out of work or isolated from family and friends or struggling financially or simply worried about the historic pandemic we’re in the middle of, adults are not less stressed right now! In fact, data shows many people are working more and have more meetings now than in the before times.
Parents—even parents who are well above the U.S. median household income and are able to work from home and have homes large enough that everyone isn’t unavoidably right on top of each other—are struggling. Their kids are consumed with anxiety and loneliness. Every day I read on social media about kids napping at unexpected times, exhausted by their stress, or coping with anxiety by wearing superhero costumes, or treating their stuffed animals for coronavirus. For parents whose kids need behavioral or speech or other kinds of therapy, the stresses are ratcheted up still further as they watch their kids lose valuable developmental time.
My son has finished dancing around the subject by wanting, as he did in the early months, to talk about the Irish Potato Famine, the Titanic, and the Hindenburg, and is now at the nitty gritty: his own mortality. Explicitly and with anguish. He asks us to save individual Wheat Chex so he won’t forget them. That right there is stress and anxiety, and it’s what I’m seeing in a child who knows his family is not in economic distress and who does have some social interaction with a pod-mate and a babysitter he adores.
There are many lessons to take here. One is that, as one of the best pieces I’ve read about how privileged families should approach the next year, written by Justice Leaders Collaborative co-founder Shayla Griffin, points out, “middle-class parents are, for the first time, experiencing the stress that low-income single parents have been living with, and we can’t handle it.” Extending that, it’s also true that many of the children of privileged families are for the first time being subjected to the kind of stress that’s standard for children from marginalized communities or low-income families. And no child should have to handle that.
Privilege still exists, and is being exaggerated in some ways by the pandemic—it turns out that in an unequal economy, difficulties and traumas continue to fall unequally in an emergency. But we’re all in an emergency. Maybe it’s possible to have enough money to buy your way out of the stress and trauma of this pandemic, but I have trouble imagining that amount of money. “What we are currently dealing with is an absolute disaster of epic proportions with no good answers, no clear sides, and no room for either/or thinking,” Griffin writes. Everyone is struggling to figure out what to do, faced with a million decisions with no right answers, trying to protect their children from long-term damage while trying desperately to keep their own heads above water. Using the pandemic, and the stresses it’s brought to so many families, and the special pressures on working mothers, to promote a preexisting agenda that mothers should stay home, as Komisar is doing? That’s disgusting.