Child cares

It is her greatest regret.

When our children were young, on the mornings when she took them to the baby sitter, my wife would carry to work a bitter mixture of guilt and loss. She hated that she could not stay home to raise the three of them.

Leaving them in the care of someone else – even though that person was a woman who dished out love and devotion as she fed them breakfast and lunch – struck her as fundamentally wrong. If she didn't feel like she was abandoning them, then she felt like she was missing out on their childhood.

Hers, it seems, is a shared anguish.

Today, 70 percent of the women in America who have children younger than 18 are working. A generation ago, it was 50 percent.

In South Dakota, the frequency of mothers who work and who have children younger than 18 is even greater: 80 percent.

No state tops that.

Carole Cochran suspects these mothers work because they must. Without their income, says the project director of South Dakota Kids Count at the University of South Dakota, there would not be enough money each month to pay the bills.

South Dakota Kids Count compiles data about children and families in the state in an effort to improve their well-being. Certainly, Cochran says, some mothers want to work, and certainly, some mothers like to work. But in order to foot the mortgage and put food on the table, most mothers, she suggests, must work.

It is a tradeoff that, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, a legion of working mothers in this nation appears unhappy – or at least uneasy – having to make.

The survey asked mothers whether it is better for young children to have mothers who work full time, part time or not at all. Almost half of the mothers said it is best for young children if mothers work part time. More than a third said it is best if mothers don't work at all. Only 12 percent of the mothers said full time is best.

This never has been a nation of June Cleavers waiting in the kitchen for Ward, Wally and the Beaver to come home. Fifty-two years ago when the apron-tied June appeared on TV, Agnes Horr was running the Roberts County Farm Mutual Insurance Agency next to the Rexall drugstore in downtown Sisseton Monday through Friday and Saturday mornings.

When finally my grandmother retired in 1980 at the age of 75, the Cleavers had been off the air for 17 years.

If the mythic portrayal of motherhood in America as someone who bakes the bread but doesn't win it wasn't dispelled before, it is now. Though no one is mourning the death of that old lie, Cochran says that where mothers find themselves today – as simultaneous caretakers and careerists – is for them often hard to see as progress.

"We have to be at work at a certain time," she says. "We have to get our work done." If mothers aren't being pushed by the pressures of the office, Cochran says, they are being pulled by the pleas from home. "That tension is constantly there."

It is a safe bet that more mothers are working today because women in America are better educated than they've ever been. More women in the United States go to college than men, and once there, they do better than men, too.

What is less likely but not outlandish is the suggestion that more mothers wouldn't have to work – or work as much – if more families in America would live within their means. There might be some truth to that. Clearly, our standards never have been higher, our expectations never so great.

Still, there is conjecture and there is fact, and what is a fact is that for Americans in the middle and at the bottom of the economic ladder, wages have flatlined during the past 30 years. In terms of wealth, their piece of the pie has been sliced thinner, too.

Coincidentally – or not – this squeeze has occurred at the same time that millions more mothers have felt inclined to join the labor force.

For an increasing number of families in this nation, a single paycheck appears not to cut it. Without two incomes – or three or more – they cannot make the ends meet.

In its survey this summer, the Pew Research Center also asked working mothers if – given a choice – they would prefer to work full time or part time. Almost two-thirds of the mothers picked part time.

When working fathers were asked the same question, however, almost 80 percent chose full time.

When our children were young, on the mornings when I took them to the baby sitter, I went to work without concern or conflict. Like 80 percent of the fathers in the Pew poll, by holding a full-time job, I was doing what I knew was right. The choice for me was clear.

The couple who lives next door to me runs a day care as does one down the street and another around the corner. So I frequently encounter working mothers in their suits or their scrubs, balancing a child on a hip while they hold another by the hand in the early morning darkness as they walk heavily from their cars to the front doors of their day care providers.

I do not have to see the faces of the children to know they are half-asleep.

Nor do I have to see the eyes of the mothers to know they are full of doubts.