The Great Experiment

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

In Houston a stay-at-home dad kisses his pregnant wife goodbye as she heads for the office, and then turns back to the task of getting their four children fed, washed and ready for the day ahead. In Long Branch, N.J., parents work alternate shifts -- she during the day at a hospital accounting office; he at night, as a security guard -- so that their three kids won't be left with strangers. In Lincoln, Neb., a divorced mother of four -- one of the nation's 9.3 million single parents -- depends on her eldest daughter to fill in while she is at work. In cities from Providence to Portland, both parents dash to work in the morning, handing their kids off to a variety of nannies, sitters, schools, day-care centers, neighbors and relatives.

These families generally have three things in common. The parents are not raising their children the way they themselves were raised. None have any idea how it will all turn out. And all live in perpetual fear that some piece of their carefully crafted child-care structure will fall out of place and bring the fragile edifice of their lives tumbling down like a toddler's tower of blocks.

Child care in America has become a kind of vast social experiment. Not only has the archetypal nuclear family of the 1950s (working father, stay-at-home wife) given way to a myriad of customized arrangements, each as unique as a baby's toeprint, but this historic shift has been accompanied by a new awareness of the importance of attachment and family ties in the emotional development of a child. Parents today, primed by racks of best-selling child- care manuals, are haunted by questions about their changing roles. What kind of bonding takes place when a child is passed from one paid caretaker to another? What are the risks of growing up without a stable nuclear family or any real community support? How do values get passed from one generation to the next when the dominant cultural influences on children are television, pop music and Nintendo?

Not that the workadaddy-housewife family is dead. Homemaking mothers married to breadwinning fathers still make up the largest category of families with young children. The "Ozzie and Harriet" arrangement represents one-third of the nation's 14.8 million families with preschool children, although dual- income households (28.8% as of 1987) are rapidly catching up. Also gaining is the single-parent family, because of divorce and the explosive rise in births to unwed mothers: up from 5% of all births in 1960 (and 22% of all black births) to 22% in 1985 (60% of blacks).

But a family of any type is subject to sudden change. Social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, writing in the journal Family Affairs, points out that just as today's at-home mother may be tomorrow's working mom, today's career woman may soon be pregnant and thinking about remaining at home. "One day the Ozzie and Harriet couple is eating a family meal," says Whitehead. "The next day, they are working out a joint-custody arrangement."

As a result, no parent is immune to the uncertainty and guilt that make the child-rearing dilemma the No. 1 topic of conversation among young mothers today, and of more than passing interest to fathers. The job is a tangle of double binds. Should a mother stay at home, providing the values, discipline and security her children need, and let her hard-earned job skills go fallow? Or should she take a chance that her kids will be O.K. and pursue a life that brings more personal satisfaction and economic advantages? "It's very hard," says Stephanie Burchfield, a Los Angeles public-relations executive and mother of an 8-month-old. "I see her only an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. I don't have a single friend who has worked full time who doesn't regret how little time she's spent with her children."

Nor does it help that in subtle ways -- a look across the grocery aisle, a comment at the nursery school -- the two kinds of moms exacerbate each other's guilt. Debbie Ippolito of Lakewood, N.J., seethes whenever a working mother makes a comment about all the "free time" she has. "People think you're eating bonbons all day," she rails. "I had a baby, not a lobotomy!" Heightening the rivalry, some of those who gave up the fast track pursue full- time parenting with a competitive drive honed in the business world. "It's not O.K. to just have an average child; you must have an improved child," complains psychologist Shari Thurer, of Boston University.

Much of the turmoil felt by parents in the '90s derives from the fact that so many are children of the '50s. Their image of an ideal family comes from TV shows like Father Knows Best; their notion of the ideal mother is the one played by Jane Wyatt: never rattled, always at home. The irony is that this "family of nostalgia," as Madeleine Stoner at the University of Southern California calls it, was largely an aberration that flourished for only a couple of decades after World War II.

In colonial America, according to Maris Vinovskis, professor of history at the University of Michigan, the job of raising children was shared by the two parents. Mothers swaddled the baby and put food on the table, but fathers were responsible for the child's intellectual and moral upbringing. The majority of women have worked throughout U.S. history, first in the home, then in the shop and factory. With wave after wave of cheap immigrant labor available during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even middle-class families had nannies. Nor is there anything new about day-care centers. In the 1820s 40% of all three-year-olds in Massachusetts were going to "infant schools," though such institutions fell out of favor within a decade.

The deeper change, according to Penelope Leach, author of the popular parenting manual Your Baby and Child, stems from the Industrial Revolution, which forced a split between the home and the workplace. "Home and its surrounding community used to be everybody's operating base, with work and play and family pretty much intermixed," she says. "Now work has moved into geographically separate production centers and takes the form of specialized jobs that cannot be shared, swapped or carried on with a baby strapped to your back." Home has been left an impoverished place, little more than a dormitory, a spot for a shower and a change of clothes. And as mothers have increasingly departed for the office or factory, children's isolation from the adult world has accelerated dramatically.

How will these marginalized kids turn out? Experts caution that it is difficult to generalize, but a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics describes some pitfalls. Children from single-parent homes face an array of risks, ranging from mild cognitive delays in preschoolers to withdrawal and depression in older kids. Children pressured by aggressive scheduling often show signs of chronic stress. "With the amount of anxiety and juggling," suggests San Francisco clinical psychologist Jeree Pawl, there is a risk that the next generation could grow up "thinking that they're nuisances. An unhandy bundle, a shelf for which is not always easy to find."

America's two most famous pediatricians, T. Berry Brazelton of Harvard and Benjamin Spock, worry about the disappearance of discipline, particularly when both parents work. "Parents don't want to spend what little time they have with their children reprimanding them," says Spock. "This encourages children to push limits and test parental authority." Brazelton is also concerned that working mothers are so overwhelmed by guilt that they "detach | from the baby, because it's the only way they have of coping."

The feminist movement has always insisted that women's liberation must go hand in hand with changing roles for men, particularly at home. Such changes are coming about, though women still do the lion's share of the den keeping. Not only are fathers present in the birthing room (90% are there, as opposed to 10% twenty years ago) and willing to change diapers, but their entire job has been reinterpreted from passive bill payer to activist player. "It's no longer seen as unmasculine to be caring for young children," says Hanne Sonquist, a family therapist in Santa Barbara, Calif.

There is also a movement afoot to extend to American parents the kind of government support -- in day care, parental leaves and tax deductions -- that their European counterparts have long enjoyed. Sweden, for instance, provides parents 90% salary reimbursement for the first nine months after birth. But the battle in the U.S. for even limited family programs remains an uphill march: industry lobbied so hard against legislation that would have required most businesses to provide 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave that President Bush vetoed it last June.

Though that veto was lamented by many parents, the debate over government policies does not necessarily touch what Barbara Whitehead calls "the emotional core of family concerns." These are centered, she says, not on the material needs of parents, but on the moral education of their children. Parents fear that, in the absence of more benevolent influences, children are adopting the values of the aggressively materialistic, consumerist culture portrayed on TV. "In their eyes," says Whitehead, "children are no longer acquiring an identity at home, as much as they are attempting to buy one in the marketplace."

What's to be done? Subsidized child care and tax credits would ease the pressure on parents to leave home before they want to. What is more difficult is finding a way to undo the damage to the family done by a century of economic and social upheaval. As Penelope Leach puts it, the most important question for parents is "not what day care to choose or when to go back to work, but how to reintegrate our children into our world." That is a challenge that is likely to be with the nation when today's children are preparing to have kids of their own.

With reporting by Deborah Edler Brown/Los Angeles and Michele Donley/Chicago, with other bureaus