Balancing act

I do know what you mean -- while I was reading your book, a friend who just got married told me that she wanted to start trying to get pregnant because she's 35 and worries about waiting much longer. But she doesn't know how to broach the subject with her husband because, as she put it, the "biological clock is such a weak card to play." She felt embarrassed somehow about being a woman who wants a baby and whose fertility won't last forever.

That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.

You believe that the average woman wants to spend more time with her kids than the average man, right?

Yes, but with qualifications. One conflict I hear about a lot is that there's a couple who agree in principle that they should share child care. But his view is, Let's just get more child care, and her view is, I want us to do more of it. It puts her in this impossible bind because it matters to her more than it matters to him that they take care of the kids, so she ends up having to do it, whereas if she had her druthers, they'd share it more. One of my more utopian suggestions for social change is that women should not treat the meaningfulness of caring for children as something they need to minimize but to amplify, to get men to see how cool it is. [Laughs] Make it sexy, and maybe men will gradually become socialized to seeing [child care] as part of their identity -- which they do already compared to even 20 years ago. Of course, practically, because of the way work is, it's still incredibly difficult for two people to both be half-time parents and half-time workers.

I found the chapter about the pleasures of motherhood the slipperiest in the book. I get how motherhood can give you moments of utter joy, but what you're proposing seemed grander than that?

What I'm trying to get at on the theoretical level is how caring for children allows us to integrate different levels of human capacity -- physical, intellectual, intuitive, emotional -- in a way that's deeply satisfying. And these moments of connectedness, pleasure deserve our attention from a psychological, scientific and even spiritual vantage point, though with the necessary caveats: People differ hugely in tastes and proclivities, in how much pleasure they genuinely derive from interaction with children, and so on.

On the personal level, sometimes our anxiety leads us to trivialize or cloud the pleasures we do get from mothering, because -- to give two possibilities among millions -- we have a "punishment fantasy" that something will go wrong if we relax and enjoy it, or because we believe that giving ourselves over to the enjoyment will make us less serious people. I'm urging women to notice in themselves the feelings of pleasure and the impediments to pleasure -- to not fall unthinkingly into feeling put upon by caring for children on the one hand, or devaluing the satisfactions to be had, on the other.

Sometimes I feel guilty because some of my favorite times with my eldest daughter are when I'm doing some kind of housework and just listening to her play with her father. I keep thinking, Why don't I wish I were the one playing and he was doing the cleanup?

There's this persecuting approach that if you're not engaged with your children one-on-one, it's not good enough. You don't have to feel guilty that you want to read while you're with your kids, for example. I feel lucky that I don't feel guilty. My attitude is, Hey, they're lucky I'm around.

Read with your kids? That's one thing in your book that blew me away. You talk about how you were reading "The Leopard" while nursing your newborn with the other two kids playing at your feet. That would never happen in my house.

A friend told me that there are two things about my book that are going to piss people off. One is that my husband seems so helpful. A lot of people will think, Yeah, right, if I had a husband like that it wouldn't seem so hard either. The other one is that my kids are easy. I have kids who, at least as babies, were very calm. They could sit and do blocks with me around, and that obviously made [child care] much more pleasurable for me than for people whose kids are climbing the counters.

But when I hear you say that, I think, well, the reason your kids were calm is because of the high quality of attention you gave them, how much you were around.

No, that's not right. One of my good friends mothers a lot like I do, but her kids are much harder. A lot of how children are is temperament, a built-in thing.

Listening to myself, it's sort of an example of how you say anxiety about our mothering gets in the way of our pleasure. Instead of enjoying when I'm around my daughter, I'm worrying that I'm not right on top of her, that I'm not enjoying her the "right" way.

For a while I felt a bit guilty dragging my kids around on errands, until I remembered I spent most of my childhood that way and kind of enjoyed it ... The dilemma of should I play with them or do the dishes is probably more intense for mothers who work outside of the home most of the day. They feel that the time with their children should be more child-focused because there's less of it. Some of my friends who work full-time definitely play with their children more than I do, and I think that has a lot to do with spending the day apart and feeling their children -- and they themselves -- hunger for it.

There seems to be tension in your book between arguing, on the one hand, that the more time mothers spend with their small children, the better for the kids, and on the other, saying in the day-care chapter that the research has found that time isn't the key to your children's thriving as much as how sensitive you are to their needs.

There is a tension, but basically, I think time and sensitivity are important. One of the studies I cite that looks at maternal-child attachment suggests that sensitivity can counteract some of the effects of time apart.

Yeah, but it also goes the other way: You include data that shows more time with their children makes mothers more sensitive to them, allows them to read their children better?

I believe that's true, but I still think that people can overcome some of the effects of time apart if they are sensitive and responsive. I mean, I look at one of my best friends who has three kids and lives in New York and has this incredibly intense job, and I just think she's a great mother. She has a certain empathy and comfort in herself, a certain kind of awareness of what people need from each other, and a capacity to give that. And that counts for a huge amount. Child-care research has the great advantage of helping us draw back and look more dispassionately at personal, emotionally charged issues. But ultimately, few of us are going to feel comfortable basing our decisions on the latest results, because they're often contradictory and never final.

You don't want to prescribe to people how much they should or shouldn't work, do you?

It's just so complicated and variable. First of all, there are many women who truly don't have a choice in the matter, and it's a source of pain to them and their children that they have as little time together as they do. But the fact that they have so little time is not a straightforward recipe for unhappiness or family dysfunction. As I try to suggest in my day-care chapter, children pick up on their parents' intentions toward them, and children have great radar for love and devotion. It bugs me so much that it's always about quantifiable outward behavior -- are you a working mom, are you a stay-at-home mom? -- at the expense of the whole question of sensitivity. But at the same time, we have to be willing to admit when we feel out of touch with our children. And if we have any choice in the matter, we need to really think through the decisions and trade-offs we're making, and make sure they're decisions we believe in.

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