May 19, 2021
Brigid Schulte was quoted in Vox about how the lack of social supports has fomented clashes among American parents:
Parenting norms in America are far from static. In fact, a hundred years ago, fathers were widely expected to take the lead role in raising children, making decisions about rules and practices that mothers would merely execute, Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at New America and author of the book Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, told Vox. “Parenting was considered so important that it was a job for men.”
That changed over the years as various approaches to child rearing gained and lost favor. For example, the idea that parents should be careful not to be overly affectionate with their children — “if you showed a child too much love then you were a smother mother” — eventually gave way to concerns that children weren’t getting enough attention, Schulte said.
But many of today’s parenting conflicts have their roots in the social and economic changes of the 1970s. At that time, the feminist movement was pushing previously male-dominated fields to open their doors to women. Meanwhile, the kinds of jobs that had propelled many white families into the middle class in the ’50s and ’60s — jobs in which a man with a high school diploma could earn enough money to support a family — were disappearing or paying lower wages, Schulte said. That meant that in many cases, white middle- and upper-class women weren’t just allowed to enter the workforce — they had to if they wanted to maintain their family’s standard of living.