Those smart and savvy moms at A Better Balance have written a book that will be your “go to guide” for workplace policies relevant to your pregnancy, maternity leave, and working life as a parent. Dina Bakst, Phoebe Taubman and Elizabeth Gedmark are the authors of Babygate: What You Really Need To Know About Pregnancy [...]
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Motherhood 101
Quite unexpectedly, I recently met Nicole Lynn Lewis, Founder and CEO of Generation Hope. You don’t meet a mom with her very own non-profit every day, let alone one so closely tied to the mission of maternal support and encouragement, so I was instantly intrigued. She graciously let me follow up after our great conversation with some [...]
“Mothers Unite! Organizing for Workplace Flexibility and the Transformation of Family Life” by Jocelyn Elise Crowley
It is very loud in the second-floor meeting room of a public library in a medium-size eastern city, the noise coming from twelve toddlers, all under the age of four, running around the room. At this meeting of the local NAMC chapter, eleven group members have put their chairs in a circle in preparation for [...]
Single Mothers, Double Standard
A lot of press about single mothers seemed to surface this week, I’m not sure why. It’s on my radio (NPR, Tell Me More) and in my morning paper (The Difference Between Feeling Like a Single Mom and Being One, WashPost, 4/18,2013). Whatever it used to mean, as an identifier “single mother” it is not very [...]
Pre-K as Policy, Not Politics
My favorite part of the President’s State of the Union address was his plan for expanding pre-kindergarten to all four-year-olds. The idea has been around for decades, and it did once very nearly become law until it was vetoed by President Nixon. But in the past 40 years, two big parts of the early education picture [...]
Ann Romney and the Caring Economy: The Politics of Motherhood
By: Riane Eisler and Valerie Young Who says partisan politics only results in division, discord, and gridlock? After this week’s media frenzy over whether or not Ann Romney was “working” when she raised five boys, a consensus of sorts has emerged. Both Democrats and Republicans agree unreservedly that childrearing is a very important activity, valuable [...]
Competitive Mothering Takes a Hit
With an eyebrow firmly raised at all the Tiger Mother brouhaha, I was delighted to find this post from Cameron Mcdonald, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s written a book, “Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs and the Micropolitics of Mothering” which looks as what she calls the “private to public [...]
Private Cost, Public Gain
The US spends very little public money on children, and a great deal of public money on older people. The reason for this has to do with our cultural attitudes towards privacy and the belief that raising children happens almost exclusively within the family. While that was likely true decades ago, most children now spend [...]
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