The last three men nominated to the Supreme Court have all been married and, among them, have seven children. The last three women — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Harriet Miers (who withdrew) — have all been single and without children.

This little pattern makes the court a good symbol of the American job market. Women and men with similar qualifications — age, education, experience — are much more likely to be treated similarly today than in the past. The pay gap between them, while still not zero, has shrunk to just a few percentage points.

Yet once you look beyond the tidy comparisons of supposedly identical men and women, the picture is much less sunny. There are still only 15 Fortune 500 companies with a female chief executive. Men dominate the next rungs of management in most fields, too. Over all, full-time female workers make a whopping 23 percent less on average than full-time male workers.

What’s going on? Men and women are not identical, of course. Many more women take time off from work. Many more women work part time at some point in their careers. Many more women can’t get to work early or stay late. ...

The best hope for making progress against today’s gender inequality probably involves some combination of legal and cultural changes, which happens to be the same combination that beat back the old sexism. We’ll have to get beyond the Mommy Wars and instead create rewarding career paths even for parents — fathers, too — who take months or years off. We’ll have to get more creative about part-time and flexible work, too.

If you want a preview, you can look at the few professions in which large numbers of highly skilled women have been able to force change. Obstetrics used to be a field that required doctors to be on duty at all hours. Today, group practices allow obstetricians to share the 3 a.m. deliveries and, in the process, have a life outside of work. Optometry and veterinary medicine have their own versions of this story.

Labels: children, culture, economics, gender, gender differences, motherhood, parenting, work/family policy

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A breadwinner father loses his job. Mom goes to work full time. Stretched by bills for a broken car and a home-renovation loan, the family fears the bank will take their house.

A tale ripped from 2010 headlines? No, it's the plot of the Ramona Quimby series of children's books, written by Newbery Medal-winning author Beverly Cleary, mostly between the 1950s and 1980s. Perennially popular, these tales of the impish Ramona and her bookish sister Beezus are back in the front of bookstores these days because of the new movie, "Ramona and Beezus," starring Joey King and Selena Gomez.

As movie adaptations go, this one is fairly faithful to the books (Ms. Cleary, now in her 90s, collaborated on the project). But in sweetening the story for today's audiences, the film's creators muted Ms. Cleary's major selling point: her complete lack of sentimentality as she wrote one of the best portrayals, ever, of an American family's wrenching journey into the modern economy. ...

The books, though, have a harder edge. When Mr. Quimby loses his job in the film, he turns into an affable, if forgetful, Mr. Mom. In the books, he succumbs to the more realistic depression that often accompanies a breadwinner's job loss. He sits on the couch, watching TV, smoking heavily and not taking Ramona to the park because someone might call to offer him a job.

In the movie, the great child-care snafu is when Ramona gets sick at school and Mr. Quimby cancels a job interview to take care of her. In the books, he once leaves her, at age seven, locked outside the house in the rain because he's stuck in the unemployment-insurance line.

In the movie, Mr. Quimby ultimately finds a part-time job following his passion, teaching art; somehow without any pesky licensure requirements. In the books, he goes back to school to get his art-teaching credentials, but can't land a job in the Portland schools. So he takes a job managing a ShopRite. He doesn't like it, but hey, the pay and benefits can support three children.

Labels: children, culture, economics, Fathers, fathers and daughters, gender, motherhood

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It takes a marriage to keep a father investing in his biological children. A mother will keep investing in her biological children no matter what. Of course, there are exceptions to this sociological rule. But, on average, men are much more likely to invest–financially, emotionally, and otherwise–in their biological children when they are married to the mother of their children, whereas women tend to invest in their biological children no matter what their marital status.

A new study in Social Forces, which explores the financial implications of the divorce revolution on parental financial support of adult children, provides more evidence in support of this rule. Sociologists Shelley Clark and Catherine Kenney point out (a) that the divorce revolution has dramatically reshaped the character of intergenerational family ties and (b) that women now have a lot more income and assets of their own to share with their adult children.

You put these two facts together and you find that, in the wake of a divorce, fathers who remarry are much less likely to support their adult children than divorced mothers who remarry or remain single. (Interestingly, divorced fathers who remain single [and few do] support their children at a slightly higher rate than divorced mothers who remain single or remarry.) So, the bottom line here seems to be that the flow of the father’s money is influenced much more by his marital status, whereas the flow of the mother’s money is influenced much more by her biological relatedness to the child. Note: children are most likely to receive financial support from their parents when they remain married to one another.

Labels: divorce, Fathers, gender differences, Marriage, motherhood, stepparents

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Consider Marie, Lola and Grace, fictional nannies all.

Marie sleeps with the husband of the family that’s hired her, kidnaps her charge and passes out drunk. Lola works two jobs to support five children back in the Philippines, furiously networks with other nannies and offers advice to a couple who are still mastering modern parenthood. Grace, a teenager who leaves Trinidad for New York, confronts her employers’ condescension while making friends, finding romance and learning the ropes about America from an established coterie of nannies.

Years after “The Nanny Diaries,” the satirical 2002 best seller that hit a cultural nerve, the nanny novel lives on, showcasing complex and imperfect nannies whose personal stories intersect with thorny larger questions about race, class, immigration and parenthood. ...

“It’s sort of the dark magic of the global economy — if you have a well-paying job here, you’re making 10 times what you make there,” Ms. Simpson said of the foreign women who look after American children. “Of course we want our children to be loved, but there is an economic reality on both sides.”

Labels: children, culture, economics, motherhood, parenting, race

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...A few generations ago, people weren’t stopping to contemplate whether having a child would make them happy. Having children was simply what you did. And we are lucky, today, to have choices about these matters. But the abundance of choices—whether to have kids, when, how many—may be one of the reasons parents are less happy.

That was at least partly the conclusion of psychologists W. Keith Campbell and Jean Twenge, who, in 2003, did a meta-analysis of 97 children-and-marital-satisfaction studies stretching back to the seventies. Not only did they find that couples’ overall marital satisfaction went down if they had kids; they found that every successive generation was more put out by having them than the last—our current one most of all. Even more surprisingly, they found that parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care. “And my hypothesis about why this is, in both cases, is the same,” says Twenge. “They become parents later in life. There’s a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It’s totally different from going from your parents’ house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you’re giving up.” (Or, as a fellow psychologist told Gilbert when he finally got around to having a child: “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.”)

It wouldn’t be a particularly bold inference to say that the longer we put off having kids, the greater our expectations. “There’s all this buildup—as soon as I get this done, I’m going to have a baby, and it’s going to be a great reward!” says Ada Calhoun, the author of Instinctive Parenting and founding editor-in-chief of Babble, the online parenting site. “And then you’re like, ‘Wait, this is my reward? This nineteen-year grind?’ ”

When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business, and they’re surrounded by a marketplace that only affirms and reinforces this idea. “And what’s confusing about that,” says Alex Barzvi, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU medical school, “is that there are a lot of things that parents can do to nurture social and cognitive development. There are right and wrong ways to discipline a child. But you can’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others and constantly concluding you’re doing the wrong thing.”

Yet that’s precisely what modern parents do. “It was especially bad in the beginning,” said a woman who recently attended a parents’ group led by Barzvi at the 92nd Street Y. “When I’d hear other moms saying, ‘Oh, so-and-so sleeps for twelve hours and naps for three,’ I’d think, Oh, shit, I screwed up the sleep training.” Her parents—immigrants from huge families—couldn’t exactly relate to her distress. “They had no academic reference books for sleeping,” she says. (She’s read three.) “To my parents, it is what it is.”

So how do they explain your anguish? I ask.

“They just think that Americans are a little too complicated about everything.”

One hates to invoke Scandinavia in stories about child-rearing, but it can’t be an accident that the one superbly designed study that said, unambiguously, that having kids makes you happier was done with Danish subjects. The researcher, Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says he originally studied this question because he was intrigued by the declining fertility rates in Europe. One of the things he noticed is that countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children—and happier parents.

Labels: children, culture, Denmark, economics, motherhood, parenting

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Critics of contract pregnancy contend that the relationship between a mother and a fetus is not simply a biochemical relationship or a matter of contingent physical connection. They also point out that the relationship between a mother and a fetus is different from that between a worker and her material product. The long months of pregnancy and the experience of childbirth are part of forming a relationship with the child-to-be. Elizabeth Anderson makes an argument along these lines. She suggests that the commodification of reproductive labor makes pregnancy an alienated form of labor for the women who perform it; selling her reproductive labor alienates a woman from her “normal” and justified emotions. Rather than viewing pregnancy as an evolving relationship with a child-to-be, contract pregnancy reinforces a vision of the pregnant woman as a mere “home” or an “environment.” The sale of reproductive labor thus distorts the nature of the bond between mother and the developing fetus by misrepresenting the nature of a woman’s reproductive labor as a commodity. What should we make of this argument? ...

Indeed there is a dilemma for those who wish to use the mother-fetus bond to condemn pregnancy contracts while endorsing a woman’s right to choose an abortion. They must hold it acceptable to abort a fetus but not to sell it. Although the Warnock Report takes no stand on the issue of abortion, it uses present abortion law as a term of reference in considering contract pregnancy. Because abortion is currently legal in England, the Report’s position has this paradoxical consequence: one can kill a fetus, but one cannot contract to sell it. One possible response to this objection would be to claim that women do not bond with their fetuses in the first trimester. But the fact remains that some women never bond with their fetuses; some women even fail to bond with their babies after they deliver them.

Are we really sure that we know which emotions pregnancy “normally” involves? Whereas married women are portrayed as nurturing and altruistic, society has historically stigmatized the unwed mother as selfish, neurotic, and unconcerned with the welfare of her child. Until quite recently social pressure was directed at unwed mothers to surrender their children after birth. Thus married women who gave up their children were seen as “abnormal” and unfeeling, and unwed mothers who failed to surrender their children were seen as selfish. Assumptions of “normal” maternal bonding may reinforce traditional views of the family and a women’s proper role within it.

Labels: abortion, feminism, motherhood, pregnancy, surrogate motherhood, women

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Baby boomers have long been considered the generation that did not want to grow up, perpetual adolescents even as they become eligible for Social Security. Now, a growing body of research shows that the real Peter Pans are not the boomers, but the generations that have followed. For many, by choice or circumstance, independence no longer begins at 21.

From the Obama administration’s new rule that allows children up to age 26 to remain on their parents’ health insurance to the large increase in the number of women older than 35 who have become first-time mothers, social scientists say young adulthood has undergone a profound shift.

People between 20 and 34 are taking longer to finish their educations, establish themselves in careers, marry, have children and become financially independent, said Frank F. Furstenberg, who leads the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, a team of scholars who have been studying this transformation.

“A new period of life is emerging in which young people are no longer adolescents but not yet adults,” Mr. Furstenberg said.

National surveys reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans, including younger adults, agree that between 20 and 22, people should be finished with school, working and living on their own. But in practice many people in their 20s and early 30s have not yet reached these traditional milestones.

Marriage and parenthood — once seen as prerequisites for adulthood — are now viewed more as lifestyle choices, according to a new report released by Princeton University and the Brookings Institution.

Labels: culture, economics, Marriage, motherhood, women

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The number of births to older mothers has almost trebled in 20 years and is continuing to rise, figures have shown.

Some 26,976 babies were born to women aged 40 and over in 2009, compared with 9,336 in 1989 and 14,252 in 1999, figures for England and Wales show.

Among those aged 35 to 39 there were 114,288 births in 2009, a rise of 41% on the 81,281 in 1999.

The data, published by the Office for National Statistics, showed a 0.3% drop in the overall number of births.

The data means the typical age for a first-time mother has risen to 29.4 in 2009, compared with 29.3 in 2008 and 28.4 in 1999.

Compared with 2008, the birth rate for women under 35 has fallen. There was a 2.3% drop among women under 20, from 26 births per 1,000 women in 2008 to 25.4 in 2009.

Labels: demographics, motherhood, United Kingdom

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"What's the book about?"

It was a question I heard frequently over the holidays this past December, as I went to pre-Christmas rehearsals, parties, and church services carrying Tsipy Ivry's Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel.

"It's about pregnancy," I'd say. "In Japan and Israel."
The inevitable response: "Why there?"

The gestation of Embodying Culture began when anthropologist Tsipy Ivry was concluding a research program as a graduate student in Tokyo, and became pregnant. A native Israeli, Ivry was surprised by what she describes as "an overwhelming and all-encompassing sense of becoming 'different,'" a sensation she attributes not only to the experience of pregnancy itself but also to the reality of being pregnant as an Israeli woman in Japan. This impression in turn led to a developing interest in the lived experience of pregnancy and how it is socially and culturally constructed in different societies. ...

Although both Israeli and Japanese women experience pregnancy as a highly medicalized event, much as in the United States, the forms that medicalization take differ greatly. And these differences, Ivry argues, are deeply rooted in distinctive cultural contexts: in Israel, a struggle to stay alive amidst constant military conflict; in Japan, an emphasis on the betterment of society through the long-term maternal efforts of child-raising.

If we think of each culture's implicit understanding of pregnancy as a narrative, Ivry contends, we'll find that the "protagonist" of the Japanese narrative differs sharply from the protagonist of the Israeli narrative:

In the Japanese arena the protagonist of pregnancy is the interconnected entity of the mother-baby, whereas in the Israeli case the protagonists are the pregnant woman and her suspect fetus. Pregnancy is conceptualized as an early stage of parenting in Japan and is all about the interdependence of mother and baby and their ongoing relationships. The Israeli model defines pregnancy as a state "in limbo" that involves two separate individuals (of whom only one is a person).

Labels: abortion, culture, Israel, Japan, Judaism, motherhood, pregnancy

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...Biological anthropologist Leslie Seltzer tested a group of 7- to 12-year-old girls with an impromptu speech and series of math problems in front of a panel of strangers, sending their hearts racing and levels of cortisol - a hormone associated with stress - soaring.

"Facing a challenge like that, being evaluated, raises stress levels for a lot of people," says Seth Pollak, psychology professor and director of UW-Madison's Child Emotion Lab at the Waisman Center.

Once stressed, one-third of the girls were comforted in person by their mothers - specifically with hugs, an arm around the shoulders and the like. One-third were left watch an emotion-neutral 75-minute video. The rest were handed a telephone. It was mom on the line, and the effect was dramatic.

"The children who got to interact with their mothers had virtually the same hormonal response, whether they interacted in person or over the phone," Seltzer says.

The Science Behind Mom's Comforting Voice

The girls' levels of oxytocin, often called the "love hormone" and strongly associated with emotional bonding, rose significantly and the stress-marking cortisol washed away.

Labels: children, daughters, girls, motherhood, oxytocin

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SINGLE CHOICE: MANY LIVES explores single motherhood via donor insemination and its implications through the intimate perspectives of mothers, donor-conceived individuals, and donors, among others, to raise awareness about assisted reproductive technologies and the growing trend of alternative families. This relevant and timely film skilfully travels around the country--and the heart--to get to the bottom of the changing face of parenthood.

Labels: culture, donor conception, motherhood, single parenting

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“Kids Do as Well with Same Sex Parents,” the headlines screamed. I crossed swords with Judith Stacey, one of the authors of this most recent study, at a debate at Bowling Green State a few years ago. I asked her point blank if she believed men and women were completely interchangeable as parents. In front of that very friendly audience, she said absolutely: the gender of parents doesn’t matter. And so she says now, in this new article the media loved. But midway through the article, her argument shifts from a “no difference” argument to my favorite definition of feminism: men and women are identical, except women are better. Her article ends with an intimation that I believe tells strongly against same sex marriage. Redefining marriage will create a cultural climate that will drive men out of the family, and lead to the belief that the only good man is a gay man. ...

But put that to one side. Let’s also put to one side the question of whether the interpretative scheme that Stacey and Biblarz construct around the 81 studies they summarize is really the one and only possible interpretation of all that data. It would take another whole article to deconstruct that issue. Instead allow me a few quotes, from “How Does the Gender of Parents Matter?” to illustrate my point that fatherhood itself is at stake in the same sex parenting debate.

“Two women who choose to parent together provide a ‘double dose of middle-class feminine approach to parenting.’”

“Women parenting without men scored higher on warmth and quality of interactions with their children than not only fathers, but also mothers who coparent with husbands.”

“If contemporary mothering and fathering seem to be converging,... research shows that sizable average differences remain that consistently favor women, inside or outside of marriage.”

See what I mean? Men and women are identical, except women are better.

Labels: children, culture, Fathers, gay parenting, gender, gender differences, Jennifer Roback Morse, Judith Stacey, men, motherhood, parenting, single parenting, women

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...That, at least, is the view of Elisabeth Badinter, a French philosopher who has shaken her fellow feminists with a frontal assault on the breastfeeding, pumpkin-peeling, earth motherhood ideologists who she believes are a threat to women’s liberation.

Her latest book, Le Conflit, La Femme et La Mère (The Conflict, The Woman and The Mother), which is topping the bestseller lists in France amid intense debate, maintains that women have thrown off the shackles of male domination only to impose a far more pernicious tyranny on themselves — that of their own children.

She advocates a return to the old French model, which involved whatever necessary — powdered milk, baby minders, nurseries, you name it — to prevent les enfants from taking over their mothers’ lives. ...

But Badinter backs her arguments up by contrasting the fertility rate in France (2.0 children per woman) with that of Germany (1.3 children). The explanation she gives is that France is more resistant to earth motherhood, with only just over half of mothers breastfeeding, for example, compared with almost 100 per cent in Germany.

“We’ve always been mediocre mothers here,” Badinter said (pointing out that in the 18th century French women farmed their children out to nurses “so that they could continue to have social lives and sex with their husbands”). “But we’ve tended to have happier lives.” In other words, you can still be une mère and une femme as well — even if the tension between the two is rising in France as it is elsewhere.

For die mutter, on the other hand, “once you become a mother, you are only a mother” — an unacceptable choice for the quarter of young German women (more than double the French proportion) who are opting not to have children at all.

Britain is somewhere in between, she says — pulled by tradition towards the French model and by fashion towards a touchy-feely, child-centred future. We should stop before it is too late. “The English tradition of sending children to boarding school from a young age is like the 18th-century French tradition of sending them to nurses — a way of getting rid of them.”

And that, to Badinter, is no bad thing.

Labels: breastfeeding, demographics, feminism, France, gender differences, Germany, motherhood, United Kingdom

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A sizable minority of children in rich countries live with just one parent — a parent who is likely to be female, and also likely to be working.

Those are some of the takeaways from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s recent coverage this week of women in the world.

Across the industrialized world, about 15.9 percent of children live in single-parent households. The United States is at the higher end of the single-parent spectrum, with 25.8 percent of its children living with just a mother or a father. ...

The purple bars represent the proportion of children who live with both parents (whether or not those parents are married). Note the length of the pink bars, which represent the share of children living with single mothers, relative to that of the blue bars, which represent the share living with single fathers.

The only country where single fathers look like more than a faint sliver is Belgium, where there are still nearly twice as many children living with single mothers as with single fathers.

Labels: Fathers, motherhood, single parenting

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In november 2009, one of the uglier fruits of the current practice of seeding mothers into the American military burst briefly onto the national stage. Ordered to Afghanistan from Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia, an Army cook named Alexis Hutchinson refused to go. A 21-year-old single mother, she explained that there was no one to care for her infant son because initial plans to leave him with her own mother had fallen through.

What happened next should disturb anyone who has so far succeeded in ignoring the fact that the United States now sends soldier-mothers off to war. Specialist Hutchinson was arrested and threatened with court martial and her son was temporarily placed in foster care — because, as the Fort Stewart spokesman explained, the 30-day extension that she had been granted was “plenty of time” to find some other babysitter for that ten-month-old while the only parent seemingly present in his life went off to Afghanistan. ...

According to an October report issued by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, 30,000 single mothers have served in those two war zones as of March 2009. That is 30,000< mothers forced to choose, as Hutchinson’s lawyer has put it, between their children and their service careers — a dilemma captured perfectly in a photograph that appeared alongside news accounts of the case. It showed what once would have seemed an unthinkable representation of Madonna and child: Spc. Hutchinson, a female soldier, cradling her baby in classic maternal pose.

Once, pregnancy itself was automatically grounds for discharge from the services. Today it is not. Now pregnant soldiers can request such a discharge, and commanders usually must grant it, but many mothers choose to stay. As to maternity leave, the services generally offer new mothers six weeks beginning the day they leave the hospital. After that they can receive deployment deferrals of anywhere from four months (Air Force) to six months (Army, Marines) to 12 (Navy). Note that of all these, only the Navy offers a deferral that even meets the American Academy of Pediatric’s guideline for breastfeeding, 12 months. Bear in mind too that current deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, at 15< months in length, are longer than any of these deferrals.

Labels: culture, motherhood, single parenting

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Today, National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) released Mama Says: A National Survey of Moms' Attitudes on Fathering, the first-ever national survey taking an in-depth look at how today's mothers view fathers and fatherhood.

The survey's most revealing findings deal with the enormous gulf between the assessments of fathers by mothers who are married to or live with their children's dads and those who do not. More than 8 in 10 mothers married to or living with the father of their children were satisfied with his performance as a dad, but only 2 of 10 mothers not living with the father were satisfied.

Furthermore, only 1 of 3 moms not living with dad reported a "close and warm" relationship between their child and the father, while nearly 9 in 10 married mothers classified the relationship as close and warm. A majority of mothers - 2 of 3 - agreed that fathers perform best if they are married to the mothers of their children. ...

The most troublesome finding for those who view fathers as playing unique roles in their children lives is the majority opinion among mothers that fathers are replaceable by moms or other men. More than half of the moms agree that fathers are replaceable by moms, and 2 of 3 moms agree that fathers are replaceable by other men. However, in a national survey of dads' attitudes on fatherhood, Pop's Culture, released by NFI in 2006, similar but slightly lower proportions of fathers agreed with these statements.

Therefore, it seems to be a majority view in the American public that fathers are replaceable despite near universal agreement that there is a father absence crisis in the United States - 93 percent and 91 percent of moms and dads, respectively, agree that such a crisis exists. The mothers who feel fathers are replaceable but feel there is a father absence crisis may believe that while possible, it is unlikely that an adequate substitute for a missing father can be found.

Labels: cohabitation, Fathers, Marriage, motherhood, National Fatherhood Initiative, out-of-wedlock births

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The day Charles Moses Martin Goodrich entered the world, a new community was conceived.

As the newborn breathed in life, his mother, Susan Goodrich, began to die. Less than 12 hours after having her son, the 46-year-old mother of four was gone. The cause was a rare amniotic fluid embolism.

It was January 2009, and shell-shocked widower Robbie Goodrich was forced to immediately think of the baby's most basic need: milk.

Labels: breastfeeding, motherhood

VOTE

...Baumgardner also allows that Greer’s books may have self-contradictory elements, and I must admit that as a 21st-century reader, I’ve found that they can be choppy and manifesto-like, with off-putting wild generalizations and quasi-magical terminology. (Of course, this can also be said of third-wave feminists’ writings, e.g., Naomi Wolf’s.) Shulamith Firestone deems motherhood “a condition of terminal psychological and social decay, total self-abnegation and physical deterioration.” And Greer veers off in some directions that left me nonplussed (the taste of the menstrual blood of myself or others is something I’m happy to leave to the imagination). But then I turned to her chapter called “Family,” in which she argues that “stem”—or extended, multigenerational—households are inordinately stable; as opposed to today’s two-parent nuclear families, stem homes can never be “broken,” as their success does not “rest on the frail shoulders of two bewildered individuals trying to apply a contradictory blueprint.

Bingo. What better phrase to describe marriage among those of my own bewildered demographic slice—parents of the Creative Class? We start with the best of intentions. In her 20s, the Creative Class female carves out a cool Creative Class career, like Writer. She meets a man with an equally cool Creative Class job—say, Devoted Documentary Filmmaker of the Obama 10-Year African Kiva Water Project. In their 30s, the baby comes: the Creative Class mom is pitched into hormonal bliss (at least at first); the very same week—argh, the timing!—Gates Foundation money suddenly comes through for the Obama-kiva-water-project documentary. Clinking champagne glasses, both spouses agree that Dad must fly to Africa for two months to finish filming while Mom cares for the baby. (The last thing she wants is be a 1950s nag—and how rarely does Gates money come through, how important is drinking water for Africa?)

After kissing her husband goodbye, the Creative Class mother now begins to care for their baby, alone, in New York, or Los Angeles, or whatever cool city they’ve moved to. She’s isolated from her stem family—the grandma, aunts, and in-laws (who all love children!) have long been left behind in notoriously un-Creative Lompoc, Fort Lauderdale, or Ohio. She can barely maneuver the stroller down the four flights of stairs to get to Gymboree ($20 for 45 minutes, and you have to actually stay with your nine-month-old and drum). Result: the 21st-century Creative Class mom’s life is actually far worse than that of her 1950s counterpart. Her husband works as many hours (and travels more), but life is uncomfortable on his salary alone, and the isolated mom has no bingo-playing moms’ group to ease the unnatural, teeth-chattering stress of one-on-one care of her child.

Labels: adultery, extended family, Marriage, motherhood

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Angela Carter once said that "paternal parentage is often clouded in a way that maternity is not." She was talking about Wise Children, her novel concerned with the slippery, unknowable nature of paternity.

The essential mechanics of reproduction have always put women at an advantage in any question over parentage. We know the truth, whatever it may be, about our offspring; men just have to take our word for it. But in the time since Wise Children was published, this imbalance has shifted. For some women, the idea of maternity is suddenly not so assured.

Last month, Carolyn Savage from Ohio handed over her baby to its biological parents. She had been implanted with the wrong embryo after a mix-up at a fertility clinic. This came after a number of other IVF errors. In June, a couple from Cardiff were told that their last remaining frozen embryo had been mistakenly implanted in another woman, who had since had it aborted. In the same month, it was revealed that a white Northern Irish couple had given birth to a mixed-race baby, after being given the wrong sperm. And the instances go on. A Californian woman was awarded $1m in 2004 after a fertility specialist gave her the wrong embryo and hid the mistake until the baby was 10 months old. A white New Yorker gave birth to a black baby in 1998, sparking a complex, two-year legal wrangle between the two couples for visitation rights.

In vitro fertilisation is a booming industry. Around 12,500 babies a year are born in the UK as a result of IVF. More than 36,000 women a year attend the UK's 136 clinics for treatment. That's a lot of embryos in a lot of petri dishes in a lot of freezers. You can see how the occasional mistake happens: all it would take is a technician's moment of inattention, the phone ringing, a colleague asking a question, and – just like that – the wrong petri dish is plucked from the shelf and a terrible, private tragedy is set in motion.

The number of cases which come to light is small but it begs the question: just how many of these slip-ups go undetected? ...

One fertility counsellor – who does not want to be named – says that she deals with an increasing number of people who fear that the clinic may have made a mistake. "It's an issue for a lot of couples, particularly the women. Mothers need to be sure of that bond and it's not uncommon to experience doubt."

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, gender differences, IVF, motherhood, parenting

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It used to irk Melissa Calapini when her 3-year-old daughter, Haley, hung around her father while he fixed his cars. Ms. Calapini thought there were more enriching things the little girl could be doing with her time.

But since the couple attended a parenting course — to save their relationship, which had become overwhelmed by arguments about rearing their children — Ms. Calapini has had a change of heart. Now she encourages the father-daughter car talk.

“Daddy’s bonding time with his girls is working on cars,” said Ms. Calapini, of Olivehurst, Calif. “He has his own way of communicating with them, and that’s O.K.”

As much as mothers want their partners to be involved with their children, experts say they often unintentionally discourage men from doing so. Because mothering is their realm, some women micromanage fathers and expect them to do things their way, said Marsha Kline Pruett, a professor at the Smith College School for Social Work at Smith College and a co-author of the new book “Partnership Parenting,” with her husband, the child psychiatrist Dr. Kyle Pruett (Da Capo Press).

Yet a mother’s support of the father turns out to be a critical factor in his involvement with their children, experts say — even when a couple is divorced.

“In the last 20 years, everyone’s been talking about how important it is for fathers to be involved,” said Sara S. McLanahan, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton. “But now the idea is that the better the couple gets along, the better it is for the child.”

Her research, part of a project based at Princeton and called the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, found that when couples scored high on positive relationship traits like willingness to compromise, expressing affection or love for their partner, encouraging or helping partners to do things that were important to them, and having an absence of insults and criticism, the father was significantly more likely to be engaged with his children.

Uninvolved fathers have long been accused of lacking motivation. But research shows that many societal obstacles conspire against them. Even as more fathers are changing diapers, dropping the children off at school and coaching soccer, they are often pushed aside in ways large and small.

Labels: Fathers, motherhood, parenting, poverty

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