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For her forthcoming book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton University Press, February 2019), Washington University associate professor of sociology Caitlyn Collins interviewed 135 working mothers in the United States, Germany, Sweden, and Italy. She asked how they managed to juggle work and family life. After researching cultural attitudes and government policies, Collins found that the U.S. lags in support for working mothers. It’s not moms who need new strategies for balancing work and family, she concluded; it’s the attitudes and policies that need to change.
What drew you to this research topic? My own mom was a working mother during my childhood. I saw her struggle a lot. I watched her sacrifice her own career aspirations to spend more time with us. To me, that seems really unjust. The idea that you can’t have both a rewarding family life and a rewarding career as a woman was a source of real frustration.
What major insights did you glean from your research? The work-family conflict that moms experience is not inevitable, but we treat it like it is. We think it’s kind of a natural, unpleasant but just normal part of our everyday lives—and that’s simply not true. The interviews with moms in these other countries showed that there are a series of policies and cultural attitudes that need to shift in the U.S. if we want moms to have the sorts of satisfying careers and family lives that we know are possible elsewhere.
So it’s not up to moms to solve the work-family conflict? Moms are already trying as hard as humanly possible. They’re superheroes who are barely staying afloat. It’s not up to moms. It’s up to dads or partners, for example, to step in and provide support. Part of the solution on a day-to-day basis is for dads to take on more of the responsibilities that we typically associate with women’s work—not just the fun parts like cooking and taking kids to the park. Women were a lot more satisfied and less conflicted in their day-to-day lives when they had partners who helped equally with laundry, cleaning the house, giving kids baths, or putting them to bed.
What countries have more helpful policies and attitudes than the U.S.? It depends on what mothers want help with. Let’s take the example of parental leave. If women want a lengthy period of leave (up to three years) after childbirth, Germany is your best bet. If women want to take paid parental leave after having a baby and would like their partner to do the same (sharing a total of 480 days between them), Sweden’s policies best align with these desires. If women want a few months’ leave (up to five months) and then to return to work, without their partners taking any, Italy is your place. If women want to return to work right after giving birth and are comfortable with finding a private solution for childcare, then the U.S. is a good place to have a baby—there is no federally mandated paid maternity leave. What women want and expect regarding their work and family lives varies dramatically depending on the cultural and political context. What we need are mothers’ voices around the table when policy decisions are made.
If you could wave a magic wand, what would you change here? Without hesitation, I would implement universal, affordably, high-quality childcare. Every family needs and deserves this support. Study after study shows that quality early childhood care sets children up for success in life, which benefits us all. Our whole society does better when children are raised well: It enhances parents’ ability to work and improves children’s outcomes. It’s a win-win for everyone (including businesses and the national economy). What we lack isn’t the evidence that it’s the right thing for society—we lack the political will to pass this sort of legislation. We lag far behind every other western industrialized country in coming to this realization.
What’s different here? After talking with working moms in these four countries, the most powerful and heartbreaking realization I had was that mothers in the U.S. tend to blame themselves for their work-family conflict. Mothers in Italy, Sweden, and Germany do not. They understand that they’re trying their hardest and that larger structural forces (e.g. cultural attitudes, unsupportive policies) inhibit their ability to achieve successful careers and contented family lives. American moms thought it was their fault that they were stressed to the max and at their wits’ end every day. American moms thought they simply needed to try harder, read another parenting book or listen to just the right podcast, and they could “have it all.” Mothers’ work-family conflict isn’t their own fault, and it’s also not their job to solve it. We need change at a societal level.
