Millions of working moms breathe a sigh of relief....

....upon the publication of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care. Or at least this is what the Washington Post would have us believe, given sentences such as 

The study may bring hope to working mothers, who have labored under a collective societal guilt since the 2002 publication of landmark research showing that early maternal employment hampered child development. 

Now I don't have any hard numbers to back this up, but I suspect that any guilt that working mothers have is not the result of a 2002 publication. Nor is another report likely to create collective relief for them. It's certainly not clear that there is any collectively felt guilt at all: some mothers probably feel bad that they have to work, while other mothers feel liberated by the opportunity to work, and still other mothers have nannies and think that any guilt for not being at home should be borne by those other, nanny-less mothers. That is, while there are certainly some individuals who feel guilty for working while having young children, this does not aggregate to a collective sense of guilt.

But that really isn't what the Post is suggesting: the "collective societal guilt" is not a guilt felt by the mothers, but rather a condemnation that society imposes on working mothers. And since society itself is not a unanimous voice, we can say more specifically that this is a condemnation that the Post and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and other organizations have been making.

The new study is "every bit as important as you might think," because it suggests mothers can decide, without guilt, "whether they want to stay home with their children," said Greg Duncan, a scholar at the University of California at Irvine, who is president of the Society for Research in Child Development.

 In fairness, it isn't clear whether Greg Duncan himself is suggesting that before this study mothers should have felt guilty for working--the staff writer Daniel de Vise makes that inference for us. But unless this research is part of a broader move away from blaming women for balancing career and child-raising, towards general acceptance of male child-rearers and female breadwinners, and, yes, a rejection of the current double stigmatization of single mothers who are called lazy if they are on welfare, and deemed to be terrible mothers if they work and leave their children at home, then I suspect that this publication isn't going to do much for relieving the various burdens under which working mothers labor.*


*Just to be clear, I have no problem with the research. I think it is am important topic for study. I just am reacting to the premise that working mothers should feel guilty, which allows us to avoid framing the issue around other premises, like society should make it easier for mothers to work, out of choice or necessity, through day-care initiatives, more generous maternity and paternity benefits, and social insurance income so that single mothers will not be forced to work out of home instead of working to raise their kids.