People have been talking about how isolated mothers are in the suburbs for my entire life. I lived it. I'm here to tell you that yes, mothers in the suburbs were isolated and it made them crazy and they in turn made their kids crazy. The fathers were largely absent and irrelevant, which cannot have been good for anyone.
We largely "solved" the isolation of mothers in the suburbs by letting them, then encouraging them, and increasingly forcing them back out into the workforce after the briefest of intervals with their new baby. A lot of books are now being written about how financially strained American families are (The Two-Income Trap is particularly good), how overworked American mothers are (The Second Shift is a classic here) and how empty the suburbs are, making them less safe for everyone. There's a push in some cities to encourage couples to stay in the city, and even try to get some families to move back into the city. Larger apartments and condominiums might eventually accomplish the geographic relocation, but I am not convinced that this by itself will solve the problem of isolation.
Families expecting a new baby generally have an expectation of what comes with the baby: a nursery, with a crib, a changing table, cute wall paper. Those who consult with others realize they'll need to put a rocking chair in the nursery, and possibly an adult bed. Others start with a bassinet, keeping the baby in the parents' room initially, planning to transfer later. These expectations start very, very young. I've had pre-school visitors come to my apartment, toddle through all the rooms, and come back asking where the crib is. I had to explain about the moses basket. For some babies, this works. But for a lot of babies -- witness all the books out there about getting your baby to sleep -- it doesn't work. They won't sleep in those cribs, in beautiful nurseries. A lot of those cribs wind up being used to store toys. Which is perfectly reasonable, although it's a little sad to see all the stuffed animals in the cage, it's probably better than seeing a baby there.
Babies are often encouraged to keep a schedule that virtually guarantees that no one who works a "regular" job will see them. Their caregivers wake up early in the morning, put them down for a couple of naps through the day, and put them to bed extremely early at night. If you do not have a baby of your own, you might never see a very young one. If you do see a very young baby, it'll probably be on a weekend, and they'll be encased in a baby container, a car seat or a stroller, or a travel system that combines the two. Parents have put a lot of effort into reproducing, and new parents are justifiably concerned about their ability to keep such a small and fragile looking being safe from harm. Most new parents won't pass their baby around for fear of germs, or the baby being dropped, or stolen or something even more sinister and probably unmentionable.
About the time parents realize that their babies are a lot sturdier than they were when born, in fact, sturdy enough to do some serious damage to their home and its contents, the babies are probably enrolled in a day care or preschool, with a whole lot of other children almost exactly their age or at least with their toileting ability. This works really well, because it saves everyone having to find a toddler friendly bathroom, and furthermore, it's a lot easier to make one central location bomb proof than having to do the same thing to every home. Only children (and children whose siblings are inconveniently older or younger) get a chance to make friends with people like themselves and, at least as important, to be around adults who actually have some clue about what it's like to be a toddler. A good day care or preschool is a fantastic resource for children. But it's still very separate from the rest of our society, and very, very different from it.
From day care or preschool, the vast majority of children in our society attend age-peer schooling. They'll spend most of their waking hours with about 30 other kids exactly their age, doing things that no one in the rest of the world would pay them to do, or even understand the purpose of the activity. Most of them will be highly controlled throughout the day, having little say in when they are active and when they are quiet, when they can speak, or sing or think without interruption. Like pre-school, not absolute isolation, but instead isolation from where they will spend most of their lives. Most schools have far fewer adults in them, and those adults often are not very insightful about what it's like to be a child -- or their insight has been closed for the duration because it's too painful to pay attention to what's going on in these kids hearts and minds.
After this has been going on for a while, it's hardly surprising that most of the friends that a child has will be exactly that child's age. It's even less surprising that, spending so little time each day with their parents, the bond between the older child and the parent attenuates so that by the time that child is a teenager, it may have no ongoing basis in hour-to-hour awareness of what the other person is doing, why they are doing it, how they feel about it. We go to a lot of effort in our society to generate exactly this effect. I wonder why?
At its most extreme, some time in their late teens or 20s, it will be almost impossible to navigate the complex cultural landscape of a given cohort. Two young adults only three or four years apart in age might be unable to recognize each others favorite musical styles, much less preferred musicians, and the same, to a slightly lesser degree, is true for other consumables. Do we do this to defeat that last gasp of family continuity: the hand me down?
Children are isolated from their families. Families are also isolated from the rest of society. At first, the isolation seems almost inevitable. A newborn takes up the time, energy, attention and other resources of anyone in that baby's vicinity. A newborn takes about five adults to truly care for it -- not full time, but five adults, so people can switch off and get a meal, take a nap, a shower, etc. Older babies need only slightly less attention. Yet we expect an adult providing professional day-care to care for two or three (and occasionally more) three to six month olds. We expect one adult to care for a baby at home with absolutely no support for many hours of the day. I have been struck, however, by how many times I have been told -- in books written by other mothers, and in talking to friends and acquaintances -- "None of my friends have children". And yet, the vast majority of American women (and men) reproduce at some point in their lives. I noticed as my friends began to have babies that I had to work very, very hard in order to maintain any kind of connection with them at all. I have always had close friends I've had intermittent contact with, so I was able, to some degree, to navigate this difficult terrain. But most people don't. They don't have friends with babies because when their friends have babies, they stop being friends. It isn't a sudden or mean-spirited break. It's just a drift that occurs, perhaps when someone stops dating around and gets married, perhaps when they save money for a house and then move far enough away to be inconvenient to visit. Perhaps the pregnancy interrupts the friendship. Perhaps it is as simple as not making it to the wedding, the baby shower, all the little social events that those who are about to become parents pay very close attention to, noticing their social circle shrink, sacrificing anyone who seems at all unwilling to step up to the plate and help out.
And then there are the childbirth classes, PEPS classes and that mysterious temptation to start attending church again that goes with having a baby for many couples. All those new social contacts -- people who have children, or will soon, and therefore have the same interests -- crowd out the old social circle quite easily, at a time when the connections are already weakened.
Nobody means any harm by this, but the effect is to divide our society in two: those who have (or have had) children, and those who do not (yet). And that's a really bad thing. Those who do not have children have a lot of spare resources (money, time, energy, minimal sleep debt, an inclination to cook complicated meals). Those who do have children really need help. Making the people who need help help each other, and keeping the comparatively rich completely in the dark about those needs is a stupidly unfair way to run a society. Lots of people will have children, or miss theirs now that they are grown. They love being around children for small, predictable blocks of time, and a lot of them are suckers for the intense gratitude a harried new parent will pour out on any bit of help they receive. We need to connect these people to each other -- and we need to stop disconnecting them. If people stayed in touch with their friends-who-now-have-babies and listened to them when they go on and on about babies and taking care of them and the difficult decisions involved in what to buy for them, how to feed them, why the don't sleep and how hard having a baby is on a relationship, then when they have babies, they won't be surprised. And they'll quit writing these books about what a shock it is to become a new parent, and they'll start putting together activist organizations to redistribute some of these resources.
Everyone has a story about the woman who had a baby and thereafter, she couldn't seem to do her job. She was on the phone to child care. She had to leave early. She arrived late and she couldn't concentrate. When you asked her what was going on, she always had a sob story about a sick kid, unreliable child care, etc. Maybe you gave some advice. Probably you tuned her out. And when she was the first one to be laid off, you were secretly glad because you were tired of covering for her. If you weren't secretly glad, skip the next few paragraphs to the next heading.
Shame on you. I don't care if she was a woman, or he was a man, but that person was doing their damnedest to juggle too many responsibilities and you kicked that person when they were down. You had time, you had sleep, you had discretionary income. You saw someone who had none of those things and rather than have compassion and show generosity of spirit, you took pleasure in their added suffering. Maybe she quit, instead of being laid off or fired, but it's the same in the end.
If you are a man, and you think women should stay home when they have a baby, double extra special shame on you. And more of it. Shake the rocks out of your head and enter the twenty first century.
To be fair, you didn't know any better, and you probably won't until you have children of your own. But it is exactly this that needs to end. Work is unsupportive of family, because it expects individual employees to act as if they have no life outside of work (there are exceptions to this rule, of course. Not nearly enough). People who spend a lot of time on religious, charitable, volunteer work, sports or an avocation suffer the same imbalanced demands upon their time; possibly you can understand the situation better if you think of it in those terms. But if you are one of those people (male or female) whose career is their life, and who expects everyone else to act the same way, since I can't club you into a more reasonable perspective (at least not through a computer screen), I'll just use strong language. Go talk to people you respect who have those other commitments. Apologize for being a jackass who is career-centered beyond the bounds of reason, then ask them to describe to you the challenges they face every day in juggling their many responsibilities. Then listen. Keep doing this until you can predict what one of these people will say before they say it. Keep doing this until you wish you were one of them. Keep doing this until you find a passion outside of work strong enough to pull you away from your job, even if it's for only a few hours a week. Keep doing this until your priorities shift to include people for people's sake, not for what they've done for you lately on the job. Keep doing this until you realize there is no future without children. Keep doing this until you realize the life you had been living wasn't much of a life at all. Keep doing this as an example to all the other career-centered victims of over-controlling parents, that they may see you as a model for a better life. Keep doing this until you die, grateful to the very end that you had the sense to leave the job and do something fun or soul-satisfying once in a while.
Private automobiles are really dangerous. While it's creepy, it is probably safer to take an infant not in a car seat on a bus than it is to take that infant in the best car seat out there in a car. (I'm still trying to find some data in support of this assertion. If you know of any, please send me email.) When I was born, most cars did not have seat belts. Women who worried about the safety of their babies in cars might put them in a basket on the floor in the back, and hope for the best. Currently, most children under eight and under five feet in height seem to be required or encouraged to use safety equipment over and above that which comes with the car (car seat, booster seat, etc.). We've done a lot to improve this situation. At the same time, we've also made matters somewhat worse. Car seats (and other safety devices) contribute to the spread of larger vehicles which, over and above the dangers some of them present to other users of the road and the environment in general, are hard to park, forcing families, once again, out into areas which have enough space for them and their gear.
Elsewhere, I describe some things that are being done to make toilets more toddler and child friendly. Public transportation with an infant or small child can be more convenient that driving a car and lugging the stroller, car seat, etc. in and out of cramped parking spaces, particularly if the infant is worn on the body, and the diaper strategy is chosen carefully. Elimination communication/infant potty training/diaper free plus public transportation is in fact what transports most women with little babies around the world when they are not on foot (probably. I don't have data to support this, either). I'm not sure what the reaction would be to stepping off the bus to pee your baby on the sidewalk. I suspect not good, which is unfortunate, because it does mean that caregivers with babies on the bus are in a hard place. They're more or less forced to diaper, with all the luggage that entails. Public family bathrooms available along most routes and marked on the schedule would go a long ways to addressing this problem. One approximately every 20 or 30 minutes would benefit the city as a whole.
Because you can't put a child seat on a bus (no seat belts), no laws require you to do so, which means you get to travel with your baby (at least short distances, but without the exhaustion of always walking), without having to force your baby to tolerate an infant seat. Buses also don't seem to charge for the infant, either. The main problem I've encountered on buses is fitting into the regular seats with my baby on me (I'm not exactly small). I suspect (altho I have not yet tried it), that the regular seats are also a little too cramped for me to breastfeed in them. The back bench and the side benches (which are preferentially for the disabled) do work. Other people on the bus do seem to be generally friendly about babies. If I were paranoid about germs, this would likely worry me, but I'm breastfeeding exclusively, so I'm not and it doesn't.
You do have to live in a place with good public transportation in order to use it, which is why I keep making the point that forcing families out to the suburbs causes them a host of unanticipated problems.
A mother traveling with her baby during bad weather would surely appreciate a wind- and rain- sheltered place to sit and possibly nurse her baby while waiting for the bus. Seattle has some sheltered benches. They seem to come and go depending on how often they are vandalized. In recent years, a public art program involving the community seems to be helping minimize the vandalism problem, which makes it less tempting for the city to eliminate the benches and shelters. To be useful to mothers, it's probably necessary to keep these locations from becoming de facto homes for those who lack other places to sleep.
While Seattle has a lot of pocket parks with play equipment, many parks are used quite heavily by adults who drink heavily starting early in the morning. This is, of course, quite illegal, but it does happen and has the effect of discouraging adults from allowing their children to go the park with an adult; virtually no one lets their kids go to the park without an adult any more, even though most indications are that they are safer today than when I was young and that was more common. Sometimes quite expensive efforts are made to beautify the park, to discourage this. I think monitors would be more useful. We could institute something like the crossing guard program, offering a small amount of money and a free bus pass to people willing to act as park monitors. We could preferentially hire retired city employees, police officers and so forth. Background checks would be performed by the city. The monitors would not need to be (and should not be) armed other than with a cell phone, walkie-talkie or other communications device for summoning more assistance if needed. Paid eyes on the park is the goal. It might be nice if they could also help settle minor disputes and disagreements, but that is probably too much to expect.
Even people who have had families are often completely unaware of the constraints our society places on families with young children or babies currently. They may have raised their family in a time or place where a single income was enough to pay for most of the needs and wants of a household. They may have raised their family in a place where the neighborhood you lived in did not strongly determine the quality of schools available. In the past, college was not required to stay in the middle class; the kinds of good-paying jobs available were more diverse. People who have transitioned across classes may not realize the expenses associated with childrearing in the class they joined later in life. Try asking around how young a babysitter a parent has hired or would consider hiring for a child of a chosen age. The further down the class hierarchy you go, the younger that babysitter's age gets. The further up the class hierarchy you go, the more incomprehension you will see, as parents hire caretakers to look after their teenage children (or perhaps just to keep the drugging and drinking to a minimum and protect the furniture).
Reading books written by women who leave the workforce for a period of time to care for their babies and small children reveals another layering of ignorance about what is involved in family, even by those who have a family. Professional women are dismayed at the difficulty of returning to the work force at the level they left, for the kind of company they once worked, using the degrees they have earned. They complain about the difficulty of finding high quality care for their children that costs less than what they bring home. They do not realize the reaction most working women will have to these complaints -- a combination of envy, and delight that life is not perfect for these rich women. Other women may have less difficulty reentering the work force, but more difficulty finding a job that pays much money at all, and are often forced to take whatever care they can find for their children, or leave their children to care for each other or fend for themselves. Often one partner is working for no take home at all, but for the health insurance that is otherwise unobtainable at any price, if any of the children have severe health problems.
We tend to believe that any problem can be solved if we work hard enough, "smart" enough, or both. If working harder and smarter aren't enough, we look for someone to blame -- spouse that doesn't make enough money, doesn't do enough around the house, a child that requires a lot of attention, someone in the family who spends too much money, whatever. We rarely look around at the larger environment. Why should two equivalent housing choices vary in price by hundreds of thousands of dollars because of the quality of schooling that is connected to that house? Why is it so astronomically expensive to buy private health insurance? For that matter, why is health care so astronomically expensive, and why is cost such a factor in determining access? Why do jobs and schools have such different schedules? Why do we act as if ten year olds (fifteen year olds, twenty year olds) have nothing to contribute to the household or society at large, and are only a cost, or more like it, a sinkhole for money? Why are we so worried about strangers we feel that those 10 (15, 20) year olds cannot be left alone for a minute? Why do stores make half their money in the days and weeks leading up to Christmas? Why does every generation require still more years of schooling just to stay in the same class position? Why does that schooling take up more hours of the year, every year that goes by?
Individual solutions can address some of these issues, some of the time. If you have an arbitrary amount of money, you can buy great schooling for your children, whether by buying an overpriced house or by paying the tuition directly. You can opt out of a lot of things, whether allopathic medicine, organized schooling, constant supervision for your children, even a forty-hour (sixty-hour, or more) week job. But why do we think that the people who identify these issues should be forced to swim upstream (or over a very tall dam, more like it) to lead the life that cares for them and meets their ongoing needs? Why is it so much easier to get what we want (as long as there's a new version every season and we're willing to replace it frequently) than what we need?
Governmental, regulatory and economic systems should exist to help distribute available goods and services in a fair and equitable manner that meets most people's needs most of the time (ideally, everyone's, all the time), and then uses the surplus in a way that the society generally agrees is worthwhile. We've gone very far astray from this way of thinking about the way we organize our world. We've gotten away with it, because the surplus, until recently, has been vast in every measurable way. As energy prices continue to rise, as productivity improvements stagnate and eventually reverse (as we realize the human cost of those productivity improvements), and as the waste associated with our consumer paradise builds unremittingly, our need to reorganize our world becomes more and more urgent -- and the window of leisure in which to do it shrinks. When you become a parent, you may begin to notice this. Unfortunately, you won't have much time to do anything about it. Hopefully, some people will think about this before children occupy their whole attention, and others will remember it when they have a chance to come up for air.
Copyright 2005 by Rebecca Allen
Created December 22, 2005 Updated March 8, 2006