The ideal mother, the ideal father and the ideal worker

I've done a little bit more reading on the topic of motherhood and work, and I've found another theoretical explanation which really strikes a chord with me.

In 1996 Hays wrote an influential book which described the notion of 'intensive mothering'. She described this as an ideology - a set of ideas which encompass what people (or a society or an individual) think exists, what is possible and what is good. Hays proposed (and this has been widely demonstrated empirically since) that our (Western) current most prevalent ideology is that mothering should be 'intensive', with the mother staying at home full time, devoted to her children, putting her children's needs above her own and feeling totally fulfilled by her domestic responsibilities. That is our society's version of the ideal mother, and this becomes internalised by individual women, guiding their expectations, their actions and their self-esteem.

In stark contrast from this is the ideology of the ideal worker. The ideal worker is totally committed to work and available to work long hours if needed and to travel oversees at the drop of a hat (Ely & Meyerson 2000)

You can see where I'm going with this, I'm sure. It is clearly not possible to be both the ideal worker and the ideal mother: you just can't be 100% committed to both your children and your job. You just can't. 

So for those mothers who do combine both motherhood and work, this then leads to some level of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling we get when there are two contradictory thoughts in our minds. In this case those two thoughts are: 
1) I want to be the ideal mother, my child is my main priority, and
2) I want to be the ideal worker, my work is my main priority.

Our brains are uncomfortable with these conflicting thoughts and look for a way to resolve the conflict. Johnston and Swanson (2006) suggest that there are a number of common approaches which working mothers use to allow them to reconcile their desire to be a good mother and a good worker. The terms in brackets in the list below refer to Bakhtin's (1981) options for resolving dialectics (opposing tensions pulling someone in two different directions):

1) Women find a way to work which doesn't interfere with their families (modifying the situational constraints). Garey (1995) studied nurses who chose to work night shifts to ensure that they were 100% available to their families during the day, and Hattery (2001) talked to women whose choice to become self-employed allowed them to be available when their families needed them. 
2) Women re-frame the 'intensive mother' ideology (reframing their ideology). Perhaps they reconceptualise it as 'intensive parenting' and share the responsibility with their partner and extended family. 
3) Women do things in stages (cyclical alternation), taking a career break, or extending their maternity leave, and then going back to work a little later on.
4) Women find a way to justify their choices (reframing their choices). These narratives are often financial. Women justify going back to work because the family needs the money, or justify putting their careers on hold because their husbands have higher earning potential. 
5) Women compromise (neutralisation) - working part time and staying home part time and strive to be as close to the ideal mother and ideal worker as they can.
6) Women make a choice (selection) and entirely renounce their work identity and stay at home with their children.

Johnston and Swanson then went on to explore the narratives of mothers (full time working, part time working, and stay at home mums) and found some interesting differences, in particular that the women's views of what makes a good mother were associated with their work choices:

• Stay at home mums felt that good mothering was about being available. They thought that a happy child makes a happy mother.
• Part time workers said that being a good mother was about quality time with their children. They thought that having a bit of a break from each other led to both a happier mother and a happier child.
• Full time workers said it was about psychological availability and felt that their goal as a mother was to empower their children. They thought that a happy mother makes a happy child. 

In terms of causality, the authors concluded that ideologies influenced behaviour, but that behaviour also shaped ideologies. 

So much for the challenges women face, but what about the men? What is the ideal father and how easy is it to enact?

The traditional view of the good father is one who provides economically for the family - father as breadwinner (Marsiglio et al., 2000). Thus to be the ideal father entails being an ideal worker - in order to be a good father you HAVE to be a good worker, so that you can maximise your earning potential and earn as much money as you can for your family. So men who buy into this ideology don't have to make a compromise. 

But what of the men who want to spend more time at home? The father as breadwinner is not the only version of the ideal father in our society. The ideology of the involved father (Henwood & Procter, 2003) depicts the ideal father as one who is actively engaged with their children's lives and who gets pleasure from those close relationships. This then is a step away from the ideal worker, and can leave fathers with a dilemma, more akin to that typically faced by mothers, about how to reconcile their identity as a good father and a good worker.  

Policies and legislation have been put in place to allow men to share in parental leave, and work flexibly, but in reality men find that the cultural norms of organisations make them fear being penalised at work for taking advantage of these policies. The negative consequences of men taking paternity leave are felt particularly keenly in male-dominated spheres (Bygren & Duvander, 2006). Even in Sweden, where legislation and policies are very family-friendly and the culture is egalitarian, organisational norms are lagging behind policies, and not all employers actively support fathers taking time out (Has & Hwaang, 2009). 

The traditional and still dominant ideology of father-as-breadwinner means that men who embrace a more involved-father ideology are considered as lesser workers for spending more time with their children and lesser fathers for spending more time with their children (Sallee, 2012). 

So we are in a bit of a bind. If women want to work more, then we have to change the ideology of the ideal mother and the ideal worker: the new ideology needs to accept that workers can also be good mothers, and that mothers can also be good workers. If men want to spend more time with their children we also need to change the ideology of the ideal father, so that involved fathers can also be seen as good workers. But this kind of change in such entrenched cultural norms seems like a huge mountain to climb. The relatively straightforward aspects of legislation and policy have been changed already, but these new regulations have had a limited impact on cultural norms. A much bigger hurdle is to change how people conceptualise motherhood, fatherhood and work. 

Any bright ideas?



References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by MM Bakhtin.

Bygren, M., & Duvander, A. Z. (2006). Parents’ workplace situation and fathers’ parental leave use. Journal of Marriage and Family, 68(2), 363-372.

Ely, R. J., & Meyerson, D. E. (2000). Theories of gender in organizations: A new approach to organizational analysis and change. Research in organizational behavior, 22, 103-151.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance (Vol. 2). Stanford university press.

Garey, A. I. (1995). Constructing motherhood on the night shift:“Working mothers” as “stay-at-home moms”. Qualitative sociology, 18(4), 415-437.

Hattery, A. (2001). Women, work, and families: Balancing and weaving (Vol. 19). Sage.

Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale

Henwood, K., & Procter, J. (2003). The ‘good father’: Reading men's accounts of paternal involvement during the transition to first‐time fatherhood. British Journal of Social Psychology, 42(3), 337-355.

Johnston, D. D., & Swanson, D. H. (2006). Constructing the “good mother”: The experience of mothering ideologies by work status. Sex roles, 54(7-8), 509-519.

Marsiglio, W., Amato, P., Day, R. D., & Lamb, M. E. (2000). Scholarship on fatherhood in the 1990s and beyond. Journal of marriage and family, 62(4), 1173-1191.

Sallee, M. W. (2012). The ideal worker or the ideal father: Organizational structures and culture in the gendered university. Research in Higher Education, 53(7), 782-802.