• There's Still A Long Way To Go, Baby

• The Problem With No Name Revisited

• The Tired Superwoman

• A Life Of Balance

• The Way We Whine

• The Glass Ceiling Is In The Nursery

• What Did You Expect?

• Term Limits

The Glass Ceiling Is In The Nursery

Who gets to see their friends, exercise, read the paper, or have kid-free fun? Not employed mothers working the extra month at home, and not most mothers who stay home full time either. Research shows a difference in both the amount and quality of leisure between new mothers and fathers. For example, a Social Policy Research Center study of families in ten industrialized countries found that fathers spend less time with young children than mothers, and a far greater proportion of their time playing than doing the work of childcare.
Fathers also had more pure adult leisure time. And because women had to grab free time where they could find it, in short intervals interspersed between self care (things like taking a shower and getting dressed), work, and unpaid family work, they got less enjoyment out of the leisure they did secure. The numbers in Hochschild's study tell the same story. If a woman works full-time and does seventy to one hundred percent of the childcare and household duties also, she can't have anything left for herself.

But what about all that "balancing work and family" everybody always talks about? The existence of the second shift means that the majority of dual-income families balance only by over-weighting the mother's side. Because women take time for family and home, they remain behind men in the workplace, or leave altogether. An advertising executive and mother of two considering cutting back at work or quitting her job so she can help her first-grader with his homework and school-related issues says

"I see this issue for all the women with kids. It's plain in front of my face. I have to choose between my career and my family. How could you not choose your family?"

Thus, the vicious cycle continues, in which women as lower earners become the less valuable worker and the more important parent. And the buck doesn't stop there, because dads, marriage, children, and, ultimately, society suffer when one member of the family is overburdened and unhappy. Getting out of, or avoiding, the Mommy Trap requires changing to a concept of a family balancing comfortably instead of plunking everything on the mother (or to be fair, the mother taking everything on) from the start.

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