A few weeks back I ran across a study which stated that “mothers who worked outside of the home in 2006 spent approximately 3 hours more per week ‘directly engaging’ with their children than their stay at home counterparts did in the 1970’s.” Of course, this piece of counter-intuition caused a fair amount of hand-wringing and consternation, especially among the “daycare=dysfunction” set, who wasted no time in pointing out that the 2006 mother got those extra three hours by cutting back on things like housekeeping and meal preparation. (They did admit, grudgingly, that perhaps some of those extra three hours came about because the modern mother also spent less time watching TV, sleeping, and spending time with her partner).
As someone who has experienced both of these extremes (not only was I a child in the 1970’s, but a mother in 2006), I can vouch for the study’s correctness concerning the cleaning and cooking part of the equation (when I was growing up, the only person I knew who had a house as ill-kept then as mine is now eventually got medication for her problems). And as for getting less sleep and watching less TV; well, my mother always seemed to do both at once, so I’m sure she was more efficient about it than I’ll ever be.
Not that issues of cleanliness and sleep deprivation really make all that much of a difference, though, because the way I see it the study itself is something of a red herring: instead of asking questions about which set of mothers spend more time “engaging” with their kids–the slovenly, hungry, sleepy, and largely celibate ones (us), or the–you know, good ones (them)–it should be asking which kind of mom did the kids prefer. Again, having been both a child and a mother, I’m going to have to say that they preferred the moms who “directly engage” with them the least.
Think about it: when you were growing up, wasn’t home the last place you wanted to be? Wasn’t home the place where you got yelled at for your muddy shoes, where a sibling/narc lurked around every cookie jar, and where the least bit of bored whining was greeted with the dreaded words, “If you’re bored, I can find you something to do”? Wouldn’t you always have rather been running free out in the woods, desert, alley or vacant lot; stepping on rusty nails, chasing down (mostly) non-poisonous snakes, building forts and falling out of trees?
When I hear the words “directly engaging with her children” all I can picture is some poor mother setting up the Monopoly board over and over again, or worse yet, supervising some highly structured craft “activity kit.” I also picture her equally miserable kids who–even though they might not know it, and even though they were the ones who begged and pleaded for both the Monopoly board and the “craft activity”–would much rather be dragging pieces of scrap lumber out into the back yard to build a “cat trap” that will eventually be tripped over by their dad in the middle of the night when he goes out to investigate the sounds of anguished yowling.
Again, not that I would expect them to understand this now: it took me years to appreciate my own “free range childhood,” where I not only learned that you don’t actually need stitches if you have enough butterfly bandages, but also what the inside of a golf ball looked like when you cracked it open in a vise. And I’m sure that, had my mother been “directly engaging” with us over the Monopoly board (as opposed to “watching” Marcus Welby, M.D.), I would never have found out the best way to hand over the rent when you are losing to an infuriatingly smug opponent (A.K.A. “your sister”): chew up the money and spit it at her.