This AlterNet story explores the emerging trend and how the workplace effects it:
Now, more people wait to have kids because they don't feel ready in light of it being so important and difficult. And being a parent is harder than ever due to "structural problems," says Lepore. "Most jobs are made for people who aren't taking care of children. The sharper the division between parenthood and adulthood, the worse those jobs fit, and the less well people who aren't rearing children understand the hardships of people who are. Employers are seldom asked to accommodate family life in any meaningful way; employees do all the accommodating, which mainly involves, especially for women, pretending that we don't actually have families."
And all of that also means parenthood has become a kind of magical ideal, a role impossible to actually fulfill due to time, personality or financial constraints -- think June Cleaver, or her modern equivalent, Angelina Jolie. Parenthood is not only supposed to take over our schedules and bank accounts, but transform our identities. When you have a kid, you're no longer an adult or an individual, you're a parent.
Add the Disney marketing juggernaut and you've got a recipe for the crazies.
Driving my kid and her two friends to a weeklong overnight camp last week, winding my way through the remote and badly marked back roads of northeastern Connecticut, I could not help but think that most of us in the car have been programmed to view the situation as a Disney show - a situation comedy. The parent would be predictably inept and hapless, the kids would figure out the way there. I almost complied, getting quite seriously lost by thinking I could outsmart google directions with my own old map that SEEMED to show such a shortcut. The kids, however, seemed uninterested in double checking any map, content to trade gum and camp stories.
What pisses me off about Rosemond is that he's sexist and disingenuous. I too would advocate for a society and economy where one parent has the option to remain home and parent - and, say, get that MBA or law degree, or volunteer to improve the community. But let's recognize the bad things about the good old days, when women's careers ended with childbirth and their career options were limited to teacher and nurse in the first place.
But even while we need time to parent, we need to lighten up about it. I cringe when I hear parents ask their tetchy toddlers, Do you want to take a nap? Do you want to eat your vegetables? Wrong question, I want to scream. THAT is too much power for a kid, and the wrong kind. These kids are like a dog who's stared at all the time. They'd much benefit from being left to their own devices, with firm rules and a good understanding of their own abilities and the consequences of their actions.
