Working Moms Found Not Guilty!

For some time, working mothers have been blamed for the neglect of their children, the breakdown of the family, and the decline of our society. Most recently, a spate of stories in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Barrons, CBS-TV, and over 50 other media outlets have hyped moms who give up their jobs to return home. According to these media accounts, the stressed, guilty working mothers of America are snatching up their kids from day care centers to become happy homemakers again.

The good news
The recently released Not Guilty! The Good News About Working Mothers, by Betty Holcomb, couldn't have arrived at a better time. Holcomb deftly refutes the bad "science" and misinformation that has driven the media's negative characterizations of working moms. She assures us that working mothers and their children are doing just fine. And she's got the facts to prove it.

She painstakingly documents the major studies that show working women are healthier and less depressed than their nonworking counterparts. Holcomb cites a half-century of studies demonstrating no significant differences in child development between the children of working moms and at-home moms. She quotes a Labor Department specialist who says there was never a mass exodus of guilt-ridden women leaving work for home. He says that "much of the reporting was irresponsible" in attempting to document this as a national trend.

Working moms' myths
Arlie Hochshild's 1997 book, The Time Bind, spawned the Newsweek cover story "How We're Cheating Our Kids" and US News & World Report's cover story "The Lies Parents Tell About Work, Kids, Money, Day Care, and Ambition." Hochshild maintained that working women were seeking refuge from their stressful lives at home, actually choosing to spend more time at work and less time with their children.

Getting it wrong
She based her entire sweeping thesis on interviews with mothers at one Fortune 500 company. Examining Hochshild's research results, Holcomb reveals that only 20 percent of these mothers found more satisfaction at work than at home. Why wasn't it reported that 80 percent of this company's working mothers were pleased with their home lives? Instead, the mainstream media represented the minority viewpoint as proof of a national phenomenon. Holcomb suggests that powerful conservative family forums and their political ideologies may be influencing this kind of misreporting.

Holcomb also disputes press reports of "scientific" data proving that day care is responsible for interfering with the natural bonding between mother and child. Armed with the April results of an exhaustive day care study conducted at ten sites nationwide, she reports that these infants and young children were intimately bonding with their mothers. Not surprisingly, this encouraging news was not widely disseminated in the popular press.

End the war
Holcomb pleads for an end to the mommy wars. She doesn't want women to feel defensive or guilty about being either a working or an at-home mom. To date, her book offers the most persuasive argument in support of working mothers.

Read Carleton Kendrick's bio.

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