Parking a link: Penelope Trunk

She cites a profile that Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook fame wrote of Beyonce, for the Time “100 most influential people” issue, gushing about her achievements in the music industry.  Then she says,

But there’s exactly nothing surprising until Sheryl adds, “Beyonce does all this while being a full-time mother.”  

In that little sentence, Sandberg does something very big. Sandberg declares that you can have a full-time job and be a full-time mother.  

This is convenient. Because now Sandberg is a full-time mom who spends some days away from the kids signing autographs. And running Facebook. And Beyonce is a full-time mom who spends some days away from her daughter on billion-dollar concert tours. So basically anyone who gave birth is a full-time mom regardless of how much of their time is spent on kids. Now we can all feel good about ourselves regardless of our choices.  

But does this help anyone?  

No. It’s a way to deny that we make big choices in our lives. Of course you cannot choose to be a full-time mom and have a big career. Full-time mom means your kids are your career. If you redefine full-time mom then you take away the ability for people who stay home with their kids to describe their work as full-time.

. . .

I know that redefining full-time parenting, as something you can do with a full-time job, only distorts the discussion of the choices women make now. And it is deliberately misleading to women who have to make tough choices in the coming years.

Now, I’ve periodically read Penelope Trunk, when some other blogger links to her.  And, as I read this particular post of hers, and her autobiography on her site, I’m a bit stumped.  She is a writer, and says she is the primary breadwinner.  But she also homeschools.  She links, in this post, to a post about homeschooling, but this hardly seems a typical day.  Does she do her work at night, when the kids are in bed?  Or do the kids “school themselves” so that she can have a lot of time to work?  (In her “day in the life” she does a lot of her work while driving her children to and from various lessons, via career-coaching phone calls.)  Does she think of herself as a “full-time mom” who just happens to be able to support the family with a part-time job?

In any event, I’ve done plenty of juggling in my 13 years so far as a mother, having worked a 24-hour-a-week schedule for all that time (except for maternity leaves, and some extra time during the busy season, but that generally consisting of logging on at night or, when my youngest was younger, during his naptime).  I know plenty of stay-at-home moms who either didn’t have much of a career to keep them in the workplace if they didn’t need to stay there, or had a career that didn’t accommodate children well.  And I know other mothers who work.

My marker, in the end, has been this:  the expectation that some families have that mom will be with the kids nearly continuously is unrealistic and ahistorical, and fails to recognize that part of the process of growing up is becoming more independent.  But at the same time, when my children were younger, one of my metrics was this:  are my children spending more waking hours with my husband and/or with me than they are with daycare providers?  And in our case, it was pretty clearly “yes.”  Even in families where both parents work full-time, there are often opportunities to minimize the daycare, when dad works early mornings, and mom starts the day later, for instance.  But families where the children are in daycare from 7 am to 6 pm, 5 days a week, with little waking time before or after, for the youngest children, or all the more so for families with live-in nannies, I’ve never really understood how the child can know that the mom and dad he sees on the weekends are the people who “count” in his life.

But Penolope misses the mark with her definition of “full time,” which she equates to that which is the person’s “primary concern.”

Wrong.  “Full-time worker” is a concept that’s got a specific definition in the working world, based on a given metric of “number of hours per week,” whether that’s defined by the government (e.g., for labor statistics) or by the company (“full-time benefits eligible workers”).  Alternately, in the academic world, you’re a “full-time student” based on number of credit hours per semester.

But the concept of being a “full time parent” just doesn’t make sense.  It doesn’t make sense when Sheryl Sandberg calls Beyonce a “full-time mom.”  It dosen’t make sense when Penelope Trunk says that only someone who’s sufficiently devoted to her kids is a “full time mom.”  It doesn’t have meaning because there is no official Mom’s Association to give it meaning, and no conventional understanding of the term.  How many hours is one allowed to spend on some other activity, after all, before you’re demoted from “full-time” to “part-time” mom status?  So let’s Just Say No to this term.