The Surgeon and the Homemaker
As a homeschooling mother, I sometimes encounter people who are shocked that I spend all day with my children. Several months ago, a neighbor—who is a lovely woman— told me something along the lines of: “I just don’t know how you do it.” She has children herself but found it hard to envision what she would do if they were home all day, rather than off at school or at other extracurricular activities. I sympathize! Before I became a homeschooling mom, I worked as an attorney and my kids went to daycare and regular school. I remember well the feeling of desperation when school closed unexpectedly, and I suddenly had to find something to do all day with my highly energetic and inquisitive little boys. What on earth would I do with them all day?
I know now that it becomes easier to deal with your kids all day . . . if you do it every day. Parenting is a skill, and you can develop certain aspects of that skill through repetition. To be clear, all parents engage in parenting. Whether they work full-time, part-time, or not at all, every parent is tasked with the critical work of raising their kids. This role is irreplaceable, and the full-time working mom is just as important a parent as a stay-at-home mom. But for the mom or dad at home, the math simply is that they spend more hours each day caring “hands on” for their kids than parents with full-time jobs. This occupation, especially in the little years, is remarkably physical. There are toddlers to feed, diapers to change, groceries to carry in, floors to mop . . . the list goes on. It also requires significant mental discernment: When to intervene in a toddler tantrum? Should a child with a tough math problem be pushed to finish or allowed to leave it until tomorrow? How to make the family budget stretch to cover extracurriculars for several kids? Our society seems reluctant to believe that this physical and mental effort is skilled work. This leads to an important question: How might society change if it understood the care of children and home to be a skill one might seek to improve through deliberate practice aimed at achieving expertise?
Before delving into that question, I want to note one terminological difference. There is a tendency, especially among those on the left-of-center, to call all care of children “care work,” and to make no distinction between care by parents and care by others. While I have the deepest respect for those who work in daycares and preschools, and I believe they are doing needed and valuable work, care by a daycare worker is different from care by a parent. Daycare workers can excel at providing safe, nurturing environments for young children, but their relationship with their charges is inherently limited, in contrast to the hopefully life–long relationship between parent and child. Group care is also different from home care. As any parent who has been stumped by their wild toddler’s sudden docility in a group setting (or vice versa!) can tell you, it is simply different to put a child with a large group of same-aged children and a single authority figure rather than to have that child at home in a family. This is not to say one is better or worse—or that children don’t benefit from group care. But the classroom management techniques used by a teacher are simply not identical to the strategies a parent might use to run a household, even if there are some similarities.
To the main question: How might our society change if we understood parenting as a skilled occupation? Most millennials (my generation) are familiar with the “10,000 hours rule.” Popularized by Malcom Gladwell in his bestselling book Outliers, the central thesis of the book is that the more often you practice a skill, the better you get at it. Put another way per Gladwell, “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Consider a surgeon as she works at her chosen craft. Surgery is, of course, a highly technical skill. It involves physical dexterity, good judgment, and expertise. It should surprise no one that the more surgery a surgeon does, the better she is at it. For example, should you need knee surgery, studies repeatedly find that you have the best chances of a good outcome by finding a surgeon with a high-volume knee surgery practice. Similarly, patients of older surgeons often have a lower mortality rate. Young doctors may be more energetic and familiar with cutting-edge technology, but when it comes to routine surgery, older is actually wiser. We don’t accord the same respect to the skills displayed by competent mothers and fathers at home as we do to surgeons, but perhaps we should. Child development experts tell us that no relationship is more formative, or has more of an impact on childhood outcomes, than that between a child and parent. What would it mean for us to face the somewhat uncomfortable fact that parenting is a skill that can, like all skills, be developed by time and effort?
First, if we understand parenting and homemaking as skills, it should not be surprising when one person in a couple chooses to specialize in developing that skill set. Claudia Goldin, the renowned Harvard economist, has famously argued that the pay gap between men and women is largely due to “greedy jobs,” or jobs where those putting in “overtime, weekend time or evening time will earn a lot more.” Thus, Goldin argues, families with kids will economically benefit from some specialization, as one parent works less to manage the home front of children and house, freeing up the other parent to pursue the gold ring of law firm partnership, the corporate C-suite, etc. However, we might see a corollary principle here. What if one spouse takes on the duties of earning the family’s daily bread in order to free up the other spouse to develop the expertise needed to skillfully raise their children and manage their home life? I remember watching a mother of ten deal with a temper tantrum by her youngest child, and being in awe of her matter-of-fact approach. She simply knew things I did not, hard-won knowledge that had been gained by many years in the trenches of parenting. The fact that parenting is a skill set might even lower the marginal cost of having another child. If much of the steep hill of learning how to parent is done with the first child, it’s easy to see some economies of scale in having each subsequent child. It also helps explain why the first baby is so exhausting. For many parents, the sleep deprivation and pregnancy recovery are paired with the mental exhaustion of learning a new skill.
Second, once we accept that parents at home are doing something difficult and mentally challenging, society might be more willing to support them. Unfortunately, we still think of taking care of kids and family as unskilled labor; something daycare workers and cleaning ladies are paid pitifully little to tackle. But how much the workplace pays someone to do a job is not the full measure of how valuable it is! Despite our emphasis on GDP and economic growth in determining which jobs are socially useful, the unpaid—yet skilled—work of the home remains a crucial part of society. If we recognize that fact, we might be more willing to hire homemaker parents who want to rejoin the paid workforce. Recognizing that parents at home have been doing something demanding and important means recognizing their “résumé gap” is not a gap at all, but rather time spent honing skills—such as project management, multitasking, and emotional intelligence—that translate to the paid workforce. Likewise, there might be more pressure on policymakers to support these important men and women, including through helping to ensure that they have generous social safety net benefits. We need not return to the nineteenth century’s cult of domesticity and its “glorification of motherhood,” as historian Christopher Lasch pointed out, to value the work of the home. As he wrote in his essay “The Sexual Division of Labor,” modern feminists often argue that equality for women can only be achieved when mothers work full-time just like men. Lasch disagrees, claiming instead that a “feminism worthy of the name . . . [i]nstead of acquiescing in the family’s subordination to the workplace would seek to remodel the workplace around the needs of the family.”
Third, if we understand caring for children and home to be skilled and demanding work, this helps to make clear that those who do it need time off lest they risk burnout and exhaustion. Surgeons are famously prone to burnout. Major risk factors include the number of hours worked and time spent working on overnight shifts. What if we looked at these same factors with respect to parents? This might indicate to us that a mother or father who is waking at night with a baby or toddler, but also spending all day caring for the rest of the family, is at significant risk of burnout. A surgeon who dedicates serious time and effort to her craft will probably become a better surgeon for it. A surgeon who dedicates all her time and effort to surgery will run the risk of medical malpractice due to exhaustion. The same is true for parents, especially those with young children and/or large families, for whom the mental and physical demands are likely to be the most intense. Ensuring that a hard-working parent has some regular time away from family demands is a difficult but vital task. Medical professionals often encourage moms to engage in “self-care.” A list by the Mayo Clinic, for example, tells moms to schedule “me time” like “coffee with a good book.” The Mayo Clinic cautions, however, that “taking 10 minutes a day to focus on deep breathing, meditation or positive affirmations may be all that is realistic at this time.” In no other occupation are workers told to limit their realistic expectations of rest time to “10 minutes a day to focus on deep breathing!” Parents who do the skilled work of the home are doing real work, and those around them should do their best to ensure that they are receiving sufficient protected time to rest in order that they may continue ably carrying out their obligations.
Fourth, once we understand homemaking as skilled labor, we must also accept that there are many for whom this occupation is not a good fit or whose natural gifts better suit them for other occupations. I could not be a surgeon. This is not because I don’t think the surgeon’s craft is valuable—of course I do. But I lack whatever gift gives someone the courage and ability to slice into another person’s unconscious body in hopes of helping them. I’m much happier at home with my kids. When Betty Friedan wrote of “the problem with no name,” I hypothesize it resonated so deeply because she was speaking on behalf of the many women who were simply unhappy at home in the 1950s and 1960s and saw a calling elsewhere. Homemaking often becomes a political flashpoint because of those who insist that only women should do it, and because of those who insist that no woman should do it. One author wrote, for example, that “When women choose to stay home full-time, abandon career and earning, in the name of better mothering, life balance, or commitment to family, we all lose, most especially women.” This absolutist argumentation (on either side) does not make sense. It would obviously be folly to argue all men over 6’5″ should be basketball players. Ditto that all women should be homemakers, or no men should be: circumstances, natural gifts, and inclination all help determine what role one is best suited to fill in society.
I don’t know how the surgeon does it. But I’m glad she does. As she saves lives, I’ll work at my own chosen profession, trying every day to get a little better at educating my children, getting dinner on the table, and the babies in bed on time. I’m certainly not perfect, but I’m working hard at improving. We both—the surgeon and the homemaker—have something special to offer the rest of society. It remains to be seen if one day the wider world will realize it.