In my family, whenever a stranger is spotted behaving badly, my mom shakes her head and mutters, "Where is his mother?" Reading about Amy Chua's exceptionally well-behaved daughters, it's hard not to think, "Where is their father?" Jed Rubenfeld is largely absent from the pages of his wife's parenthood polemic, so the Daily Beast collected some friends and colleagues to speculate as to what sort of dad he is. It's a fool's game, but let's play!

By all accounts (except Chua's) Rubenfeld isn't an absent father. He reads Tolkein out loud to his daughters, piles into bed with the girls and the dogs for family movie nights, and takes them to water parks (after piano practice, one assumes). So if Rubenfeld's parenting style is so different from his wife's, why didn't he have a bigger influence on the way their daughters were raised? There were definitely conflicts: Chua told the New York Times the first draft of her book had page after page about fights they had over their girls. But, with the exception of the occasional pancake breakfast, he lost those fights. Why? At least in part because he has something in common with a lot of Western moms: ambivalence. "He had a lot of anxiety," Chua said. "He didn’t think he knew all the right choices.”

Not so his wife; as Ann Hulbert pointed out, the most astonishing thing about Chua isn't her philosophy so much as how strongly she believes it (or appeared to in the WSJ excerpt). There are a lot of western moms gaping at Chua who don't have a piano in their home, let alone want their kids in Carnegie Hall. But they would very much like not to be wracked by guilt and indecision about every parenting choice they make. (On the Motherlode blog yesterday, Lisa Belkin said the vicious comment wars that erupt on mommy blogs are a measure of mommies' insecurity).

If outsiders are amazed at Chua's attitude, imagine how her husband feels. Friends told the Daily Beast parenting isn't the only area in which Rubenfeld seems uncertain of himself; one said his "bravura style comes also with a lot of self-doubt." It's completely unsurprising that a talented but insecure man with a strong-willed wife would cede parental decision-making to his spouse. As KJ points out, it's women who shoulder the bulk of the parenting burden anyway (the New York Times' blog about "Adventures in Parenting" is named "Motherlode," for crying out loud). And if a woman is intelligent, ambitious, and completely unafflicted by the ambivalence that's so common among Western parents, her anxious husband doesn't stand a chance.

Tags: Amy Chua, amy chua battle hymn, motherhood, working motherhood

Irin at Jezebel examines the controversy over the term "birth rape," which is used in what I'd call the childbirth empowerment circles. These circles have adopted "birth rape" to describe the trauma of having doctors poke and prod your body against your will, or bully you into procedures you don't want, or otherwise assume that your right to autonomy was checked at the door of the hospital. While I agree with the general goals of the childbirth empowerment movement, I really do wish they wouldn't use the term "birth rape" to describe these experiences.  It's misleading.

The problem is that actual rapists have completely different motivations than imperious doctors who inadvertently traumatize their patients by pushing them around in the birthing room. Actual rapists want to traumatize their victims—getting off on the power they have over their victims and the fear it instills in them is the whole point of raping them. (Don't believe me? Here's some evidence to ponder on this subject.) Doctors who push around their patients are rarely doing so out of sadism so much as contempt for the intelligence of their patients. Are they sexist? Sure. Do some exhibit contempt for women that's so serious it fades into misogyny? Absolutely. Can this be traumatizing? Definitely.  But is it sadistic in the way that rape usually is in the real world? I'm unconvinced.

It may seem piddling to worry about these issues, but actually it's a big deal. If the social definition of rape is rooted in the trauma to the victim and not in terms of what the actual rapist did and why, we've lost our main tool in stopping rape from actually happening. After all, the way to stop the trauma-infliction is to get those inflicting trauma to cut it out. And we can't even begin that conversation until we know why they do what they do. So our terms have to center around the actors, not the objects of their actions. Which doesn't mean that we have any less sympathy for the women victimized by either rape or traumatic birth experiences, just that we're more exacting in our language and more productive in our activism.

The difference between what motivates a rapist and what motivates a bad doctor is critical when it comes to bringing a halt to horrible birth experiences. If we want bad doctors to cut it out, we have to define what they're doing wrong accurately. In most of these cases, they just don't respect their patients. That's the problem that has to be worked on—getting them to the point where they listen to and respect their patients. Approaching them like they act out of sadism is simply going to turn them off.

Getting actual rapists to cut it out is a much more complicated problem, and obviously one for a different post. Which is part of the reason using rape as a metaphor for traumatic birth experiences falls apart under any in-depth examination.

Photograph of pregnant woman reclining in hospital gown by Comstock/Thinkstock.

Tags: pregnancy

Despite the fact that writer Michael Joseph Gross could not get anyone close to Sarah Palin to talk to him, he went ahead with this story in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, which depicts the former Alaska governor as "a closed book and a constant noisemaker," someone with a hairtrigger temper whose relationship with the truth is iffy. Gross does a good job of pointing out Palin's various dishonesties. She tells an audience that before she had her son Trig, who has Down syndrome, "I had never really been around a baby with special needs." This is a lie. Gross points out that Palin has an autistic nephew, which she discusses in her book, Going Rogue.

But I find the opening anecdote about Palin's young daughter Piper troubling. Gross depicts Piper backstage at a speech her mother is giving in Independence, Mo. Piper is playing with the other kids, like any normal child, "until she gets the signal to do her job: march to the podium, pick up Palin’s speech, and allow Palin to make a public display of maternal affection. On cue, Piper parts the curtain. As the child appears, a loud and doting 'Awww' melts through the crowd."

While I don't agree with the way Palin uses her children as political props, I also don't like the underhanded way Gross uses Palin's motherhood to indict her character. It's not just the opening anecdote that rankled. He writes:

[A]t least since the start of the 2008 campaign, Todd has been shouldering the bulk of the parenting and ... Sarah’s relationship with her children has grown more distant. The children did not, as Sarah has claimed, have a chance to weigh in on her decision to run for vice president. She did not even deliver the news to them personally; as has been reported, she asked McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, to do it for her. Todd reportedly told Sarah that, if the children spent too much time on the campaign trail, they would pay a price: grades would tumble and discipline would fall apart. When she agreed to serve as McCain’s running mate, one of her children was already failing in school, according to campaign aides. But Sarah, these aides say, seemed comforted by having the children around, and she seemed lonely when they were gone. An aide overheard conversations between Sarah and Todd in which Sarah tried to make a self-serving argument sound selfless, holding that the campaign was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, one that she could not deny the children. 'I don’t care what it costs,' she said. 'I want them here.' Although the couple hired a nanny to help the children with their homework, little homework got done.

I would wager that Michelle Obama has "shouldered the bulk of the parenting" since the start of the 2008 campaign as well, and yet, this is pretty much never mentioned in an article about the president. I'd wager that Cindy McCain has been doing the bulk of the parenting in her household, well, forever, as her husband spends much of his time in Washington while Cindy remains in Arizona. I applaud Gross for calling Sarah Palin out on her endless fibbing. But don't use the fact that she has an egalitarian household to make her look like a bad mother.

Tags: motherhood, piper palin, Sarah Palin, sarah palin vanity fair, todd palin, Vanity Fair

As Hanna says, writing and motherhood can be an uneasy combo; there is always someone who needs to be fed or read to or bathed or listened to or driven places, and in meeting the needs of so many dependents, it's easy to let the writing day slip away from you, or sit down at the computer and forget what you wanted to say (or even why you walked into the room in the first place). So pressing are the demands that some writers have resorted to extreme measures: We are reminded in a recent biography of Muriel Spark that Spark profoundly neglected her son, leaving him behind when she traveled to London during the war, then choosing for him to be raised by others. As Joseph O'Neil notes in his review of Martin Stannard's Muriel Spark: The Biography, "Spark provided for her son financially and would drop by in Edinburgh from time to time, but she never even tried to combine a mother’s usual responsibilities with those of a writer. She remained on red alert against that enemy of promise, a son’s need for a full measure of love." As a devotee of Spark, I sort of knew this but was disappointed to be reminded that works like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Memento Mori were produced at such a cost. O'Neil, thoughtfully exploring the challenges that parenthood presents to women writers (and noting that male writers with little time for their children tend to be less harshly judged) also quotes Doris Lessing, who did some offspring-offloading of her own. Lessing pointed out: “Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.”

No doubt this is true, and far truer when these women were writing than it is now. Thankfully, however, there is the charming counterexample of Agatha Christie, mistress, it emerges, not only of murder mysteries but of multitasking. As Michael Dirda pointed out earlier this year, in his review of a collection of Christie's notebooks, the "cheap school-exercise books" in which she plotted her works: "Christie's notebooks are only partly work-related. She also used them to scribble down shopping lists and telephone numbers or to remind herself of a hair-dressing appointment. But turn a page and suddenly you will find 'Nitro benzene—point is—it sinks to bottom of glass—woman takes sip from it—then gives it to husband. ' " Dirda quotes the book's creator and the notebooks' interpreter, John Curran, who noted that: "The plotting of the latest Poirot novel can be interrupted by a poem written for [daughter] Rosalind's birthday; a page headed, optimistically, 'Things to do' is sandwiched between the latest Marple and an unfinished stage play."

Now, whenever I contemplate the chaos of little notebooks I keep here and there—scribblings from some interview, combined with grocery lists and the title of some movie I mean to order for the kids from Netflix, not to mention, probably, some mashed crumbs that have left a greasy shadow on the paper—I think about Dame Agatha, planning a daughter's party while plotting the perfect poison, and feel that perhaps it can, after all, be done—all of it.

Tags: Agatha Christie, Martin Stannard, Michael Dirda, motherhood, multitasking, Muriel Spark, writing

Prompted in part by Dana Stevens' terrific review, I admittedly rushed out this weekend with my 6-year-old daughter to see Toy Story 3. I was not disappointed. I wept as Dana wept—but less because the movie conjured up my own lost childhood (even though, as a kid, I had the exact same toy rotary-dial phone that plays a heroic role in the movie) than because the entire Toy Story franchise strikes me as a deep and moving meditation on parenthood. This past week, there's been a lot of talk on the XXFactor about how child-rearing necessarily makes parents unhappy. Yes, life as a toy can be hard, scary, and more than a little heartbreaking. But I defy anyone to see Toy Story 3 and not also comprehend its profound consolations.

In all three movies, the toys are the parents who are owned by "their" children. That's not to say Pixar romanticizes childhood or parenthood. For every sweet kid like Andy in the series, there are several holy terrors: the neighbor who tortures toys in the original Toy Story,the out-of-control toddlers at Sunnyside Day Care in this latest installment. In her review, Dana recalls the tear-inducing montage from Toy Story 2, when the cowgirl doll recalls how she used to play with her previous owner—that is, until the girl moved on to nail polish, boys, and beyond. In other words, kids grow up and in the process necessarily leave their toys behind. In the new movie, Woody crawls up on Andy's dresser and looks out over the room of his child—at the old posters, pictures, and sports trophies that Woody knows are all about to be packed away as Andy heads to college. What parent hasn't surveyed a similar scene with the same sense of loss and foreboding? Woody wants to go to college with Andy—and at first it seems he will. But as every adult-averse teenager in the audience must be thinking: That can't possibly work!

Early on, the toys try various schemes (one, in a sign of the times, involves a cell phone) to try to get Andy's attention, to no avail. Woody remarks, "We knew it was a long shot," before conceding it's been years since Andy has really played with any of them. This existential dread of the end of child-rearing is part of the magic, poignancy, and humor of all three films. Toys know their role in any child's life is necessarily limited. They get their kids on borrowed time—all they can do, as Woody keeps saying in the new movie, is "be there for Andy" as long as he needs them and then hope for the best. As a toy, you can't begrudge your owner's growing up. (In this sense, the bitterness in the movie of Lots-O-Huggin Bear is a cautionary tale about parents who can't let go.)

At the film's beginning, Woody tries to cheer up the other demoralized toys by noting that, if they're lucky, they'll get tucked in the attic and might be dragged out again, years hence, if and when there are any grandkids. Woody and co. can't seem to imagine, at first, a life beyond the empty nest: It's either the boredom of deep storage or the trash. Without giving away any secrets, I hope, this is why the rest of the movie is so satisfying. The toys, in fact, do move on and have adventures, but not before getting to see the fruits of their love: how one small boy grew up into a mature and compassionate young man.

Tags: children, Happiness, motherhood, parenthood, Toy Story 3

A new report says that the past decade has brought an enormous increase in lawsuits against employers for discrimination on the basis of family responsibilities. A quieter, dramatic example of the child-care crisis is a recent postponement of the prison sentence of a mother of three, granted solely because she has no child care.

Janira Bueno was convicted in New York federal court, after a guilty plea to multiple fraud counts in a tax-fraud conspiracy, along with 11 other defendants (including her husband). She’ll serve her two-year prison sentence eventually, but has up to three years or even longer to find suitable care for her three children, the youngest of whom is two.

Judge Harold Baer decided that the “extraordinary circumstances” related to the care of Bueno’s children and the lack of an available caregiver demanded an unusual solution in setting the terms of Bueno’s sentence. In a compassionate opinion filed last week, Judge Baer wrote that he sought to balance the need to sentence Bueno appropriately with “the need to ensure that innocent children are properly cared for and do not become wards of the state, or in foster care.” He cited evidence of her devotion to her children and her lack of previous criminal record as factors in his decision. The youngest child will be kindergarten-aged by the time Bueno likely will have to surrender; the oldest of the three will be a teenager. From a child-development perspective, the adjournment of her sentence could, obviously, have (or avoid) dramatic effects on the kids. Self-described "sentencing geeks" find this kind of move interesting because it illustrates the effects of recent Supreme Court decisions that have given sentencing judges more flexibility in abiding by the notorious federal sentencing guidelines. The Bueno decision relies more on logic and on practical considerations than on a technical formula.

Too bad for workers—and for Bueno—that prison terms aren’t as easy to lose as jobs. Federal law forces employers to keep jobs available (sort of, if workers qualify, if and if and if) for a luxurious 12 weeks while you sort out child care and other family-related responsibilities. After that, better catch a windfall or find someone to watch the kids. The data reported by the Center for WorkLife Law clangs the bell: Lawsuits against employers on the basis of “family responsibility discrimination” are up 400 percent in the last 10 years, even while overall employment discrimination lawsuits decreased.

Herein lies the peculiarity of the outcome of the case of Janira Bueno. Meet and right that her kids’ welfare determined the terms of her sentence. But isn’t it weird that the American way of child care (expensive, inaccessible, both, or worse) is so gnarled that a federal judge has to tinker with details when the goal is to make sure a convict serves her time? Prison service shouldn’t be the call to arms that gets us to a reasonable solution for families who want to 1) stay employed and 2) secure care for their children. I guess, with a groan and lots of salt, we’re to ask W.W.S.D. (what would Sweden do)?

Photograph of children by Karim Sahib/Getty Images.

Tags: Bueno, childcare, law, prison, sentences, Supreme Court, workplace equality

This news that shouldn't surprise you if you've been paying attention: Children raised by lesbian couples tend to do better on average than children raised by straight couples. There are probably a million reasons for this, but the first that comes to mind for me is that it might just be better on average to have two moms instead of just one. That's two people who've been socialized from birth to identify as nurturers.

Gay or not, your average woman has had a lifetime of experience in the neccessary-for-parenting arts of boosting self-esteem, monitoring loved ones to see if they want for anything, and even minor things like choosing food for nutritional value instead of taste. Obviously, individuals will vary, but few women, regardless of sexual orientation, escape the gendered training to put others before yourself. One of the things that a sexist society does wrong by men is discourage them from learning these skills, and sometimes even shames them for doing things like caring too much or having feelings. For a lot of new fathers, there can be a steep learning curve in learning these basic skills. Some do a bang-up job of reaching the minimum mommy level, but some don't even bother, creating generation after generation of TV writers churning out story lines of grown adults feeling estranged from fathers, among other things.

The ugly truth is that women do more housework—including child care—than men, even in our supposedly enlightened time. When the average straight couples has children, her housework increases three times as much as his. Again, individual mileage may vary, but on average, it seems replacing men with women simply means more work (and nurturing) gets done. And children benefit.

Conservatives who trot out the "children need a mother and a father" line have a very specific and erroneous belief in play—that children are better off the closer their family hews to a traditional model in which the mother is submissive to the father, the mother does all the nurturing and the father does all the discipline, and children learn that gender roles are rigid opposites. I suspect the opposite is true, and that children do better if gender roles are flexible and all adults in their lives are nurturers. A similar study that compared traditional nuclear families with ones in which the fathers try to take on more of the mothering role would probably produce similar effects as this one that compared lesbian families to straight ones.

Tags: fatherhood, gay marriage, gay parents, motherhood

Ruth Marcus calls foul on Sarah Palin's fondness for doublespeak when she's discussing abortion rights. Palin's tactic is to suggest that folks who would legally force you to carry an unintended pregnancy to term whether you like it or not are the ones offering you a "real choice." Marcus points out that you cannot offer someone a choice by not letting them have choices, which should seem obvious, but sadly, we've all grown so accustomed to nonsensical conservative doublespeak that sometimes you're simply forced to point out the obvious.

There's nothing intriguing about Palin's establishment and then tearing-down of straw feminists who she claims tell women they can't have both jobs/education and babies. Since the second wave at least, feminists have been at the forefront of making is possible for women to have it all—it's the reactionary, anti-feminist forces that always say we can't. I promise you that the difference between a world where working mothers don't struggle and the current one where they often do isn't mandatory childbirth. After all, the last time mandatory childbirth was the law of the land, working women had even fewer breaks than they do now.

Beyond even that, there's a deeper fallacy to Palin's assertion that feminists are underestimating women by suggesting that we leave it up to an individual woman to decide what she can handle or wants to handle. Part of it is that she's disguising a deep contempt for women's intelligence with this "You go, girl!" cover nonsense. She's spinning an image of women as dumb bunnies who have to be told, by her or by feminists, what they're capable of because they can't figure it out for themselves. Her image of women is that of creatures so dumb they can't know if they're capable of handling it all unless they're forced to do so.

The feminist view isn't one of automatic abortion but of having the right to choose. We believe in choice because we grasp something that seems beyond Palin's imagination, which is that not all women are the same woman. Even Palin's daughter Bristol has clued into what her mother denies, which is that different women have different desires and capabilities. Because one woman feels perfectly capable and desirous of caring for an infant at a certain point in her life doesn't mean that all women will feel the same or even that this woman will feel that way in a different part of her life. (After all, more than 60 percent of women having abortions are mothers already, and we can assume they know perfectly well what they're getting in to if they have another baby.)

I think this more than anything is what annoys me about anti-choice rhetoric. Perhaps it's because the disingenuous bleating about murder has become wallpaper now, or maybe I just really, really hate having my intelligence insulted. But the head-patting paternalistic assurance that someone like me only thinks she doesn't want a baby but will totally change her mind if forced makes me see red. No, I promise you that I don't want to have a baby. No, I don't think this because I'm delusional or stupid or have low self-esteem or have been brainwashed. I'm quite capable of knowing my own mind, thank you very much. And I trust that other women who make their own choices are also the best judges of their own circumstances, certainly better judges than some stranger who has never met them and knows nothing about them.

And no matter what Palin might say, her implication is that pregnancy and motherhood are a trifle, no real burden at all to anyone, no matter what her circumstances. I consider that insulting to mothers, as does the blogger Digby.

[Dante Atkins] sets forth the fundamental liberal value --- the freedom to choose your own destiny, a value which almost never seems to make it into the discussion of abortion anymore, as if bearing children, whether one then raises them or not, is a trifling matter that only the most depraved or selfish person would refuse to do. Parenthood is at once nothing and everything.

I'm at the age where it seems every other woman I know is pregnant or nursing, and while I'm ecstatic for them, it's all served to reinforce my pro-choice beliefs. I've seen everything from mild cases of morning sickness to months confined to bed in service of bringing a baby into the world, and these kinds of sacrifices should be freely chosen out of love instead of foisted on the unwilling. To suggest that all women are equipped to make these sacrifices at any point in time is to insult those who take on the burden because they want to, not because they have to.

Photograph of Sarah Palin by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

Tags: feminists for life, motherhood, Sarah Palin

From Ann Gerhart in the Washington Post, a thoughtful piece over the weekend about how much it matters that there are mothers on the Supreme Court, as opposed to women in general. We've already had Round 1 on this topic from Peter Beinart, skewered by Kate Harding, who pointed out that, given how hard it is to get to the top of the legal profession as a working mother, it's hardly surprising that Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor don't have traditional nuclear families. Now Ann asks about the nomination of Kagan, non-mother: "For women and their climb toward social and economic parity, is this a sign of progress or a setback? And for the country and its Constitution, would more mothers on the bench change the way the laws of the land are interpreted?"

There's no clear answer to the second question—no research on whether mothers interpret the law differently from women who aren't mothers. As Ann asks, who wants to throw that fuel on the fire of the mommy wars? In general, the distinction between women who are mothers and women who aren't seems both telling and useless. Yes, raising kids is its own kind of intense life experience; on the other hand, there are so many ways to be a caregiver, so many different kinds of family (and friends) to pour your time and heart into. In this era of involved fatherhood, or so we hope, another dividing line is between two-parent households in which both parents work full-time or close to it, and the more traditional gendered arrangement.

Ann also asks whether three is a kind of magic number for women on the Supreme Court. The argument is that 33 percent is a real threshold for change. It comes from Dina Refki, director of SUNY-Albany's Center for Women in Government and Civil Society, who says that once you have that critical mass, internal dynamics start to shift. Ann points out that if Kagan is confirmed, "The number of women on the Supreme Court will hit that "change threshold" of 33 percent for the first time in its history." I'd rather think about the possibilities of that than the precise value of diaper changing. Laura Bush gave Kagan a surprise thumbs up for getting to three, too.

Photograph of Elena Kagan and Dianne Feinstein by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

Tags: Elena Kagan, motherhood, supreme court nomination

The Times of London has a rollicking interview with Elisabeth Badinter, the French philosopher and author of Le Conflit, La Femme et La Mère (The Conflict, The Woman and The Mother). Badinter, a mother of three and grandmother of "loads" of grandchildren, argues that in the past few decades motherhood has become a "threat to women's liberation" because women have become so wrapped up in raising perfect children that they sublimate their own identities and desires. (Katie Roiphe made a somewhat similar argument in a DoubleX piece on mothers and Facebook.) "We've always been mediocre mothers [in France]," Badinter says, and goes on to say, "Today, we’re told we’re not allowed to smoke, to eat unpasteurised cheese or seafood or even to a drink a glass of wine when we are pregnant. It’s time to stop all that.” Of course, she says this as she chain-smokes Stuyvesants.

Badinter's views are expressed in a way that is meant to maximally enrage her readers, but perhaps there is something to her thesis. A new study from economists at UC-San Diego shows that since the '90s, women from all levels of education have been spending more and more hours with their teenagers as part of the "rug-rat race"—the attempt to get their children into top-notch colleges. Mothers do this even though they find child care less enjoyable than cooking or housework. According to ScienceDaily:

On average, the amount of time college-educated women spent on childcare went up from 13 to 22 hours per week since the mid-1990s. By contrast, the amount went up from 11 to 16 hours for women without a college education. ... Most of the increases came from time spent with older, school-age children—and especially from time spent on taking the kids from one activity to the next.

Researchers noted that this happened at the same time that college admissions became hypercompetitive and college graduates started making a lot more money than noncollege grads. The authors of the study say that a lot of this time is "wasteful overinvestment." Both parents and children would probably benefit from a little more unstructured time—though maybe not from smoking Stuyvesants during gestation.

Tags: elisabeth badinter, mommy wars, motherhood, oppression