Liberating Women from the Maternal Instinct

You probably believed that feminism had given women the freedom to choose. Not just the freedom to choose abortion, but the freedom to choose how they conducted their lives.

Many feminists believe wholeheartedly in allowing women the freedom to choose their life plan, but in the Feminist Paradise of Sweden, women are not free to stay at home to bring up their children. Day care is nearly compulsory and women with young children are forced, by law or by public opinion, to abandon their children to day care facilities.

Remember the unfortunate Democratic politician and enabler-in-chief, who wrote a book explaining that it takes a village? Perhaps she was suggesting that children should be taken from their mothers and placed in daycare.... the better to allow their mothers to pursue their careers.

A radical political party, called the Feminist Initiative, promotes these policies because it wants to “liberate women from their maternal instincts.” There you have it folks, the Feminist Initiative wants to liberate women from being women. Dare we say, as Erica Komisar writes in the Wall Street Journal this morning, that this practice is bad for children? Surely, it is.

Many American leftists take Sweden as a role model. After all, Komisar explains, it:

... offers excellent free or subsidized prenatal care, 480 days of paid leave for both natural and adoptive parents, and additional leave for moms who work in physically strenuous jobs. Swedish parents have the option to reduce their normal hours (and pay) up to 25% until a child turns 8.

And yet, these generous programs, coupled with government run day care, deprive women of the choice to stay at home with their children:

… it comes with pressure on women to return to the workforce on the government’s schedule, not their own. The Swedish government also supports and subsidizes institutionalized day care (they call it preschool), promoting the belief that professional care-givers are better for children than their own mothers.

If a mother decides she wants to stay at home with her child beyond the state-sanctioned maternity leave, she receives no additional allowance. That creates an extreme financial burden on those families, and the pressure is social as well. A 32-year-old friend told me that she was in the park with her 2-year-old son, when she was surrounded by a group of women who berated her for not having the boy in day care.

Any mother who decides to work less or not at all-- in order to bring up her child-- is stigmatized and condemned as reactionary.

But is day care an adequate substitute for motherly care? Not at all, Komisar explains:

Ample scientific research shows that institutionalized day care is bad for very young children. The ratio of staff to children is too low, and the environment is confusing, overly stimulating and potentially harmful to a child’s developing brain.

Ninety percent of Swedish children under 5 are in day care. This likely contributes to mental-health problems. In 2012 roughly 20% of Swedish adolescents reported at least five instances of self-harming behavior, and the teen suicide rate hit a 25-year high in 2013.

One recalls that self-harming behaviors are commonplace among American children. Could it be that they are suffering for lack of maternal attention and care.

Komisar compares the situation in Sweden with that in America:

While Sweden has worked hard to eliminate material poverty, it is creating a society whose children are suffering from emotional poverty. Children need their parents, and very young children especially need their mothers. I worry that the U.S. is heading in the same direction. Women increasingly value—or are pressured to value—career and professional achievement over family. Like Sweden, Americans have devalued parenting, and specifically motherhood, and are creating emotionally impoverished young people who have difficulty in sustaining intimate relationships and functioning as independent adults.

Komisar believes that the Swedish model produces economic growth and well-being.  I suspect that the benefits are exaggerated. But she is not exaggerating when she says that the childcare policies, the effort to liberate women from their maternal instinct is damaging children.