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"  If you&amp;#039;re an American woman who is even thinking of having a baby, someday, with someone, and you don&amp;#039;t have dual citizenship in one of over 168 countries that offer paid maternity leave, listen up: Your mommy-friends aren&amp;#039;t exaggerating about how hard it is. According to Sharon Lerner, author of the new book The War on Moms: On Life in a Family Unfriendly Nation (Wiley), American motherhood is brutal. Having a baby here plunges parents into a battle where the casualties are sleep deprivation (working mothers typically get less than 6 hours of sleep per night\u20141-2 hours less than recommended by the Centers for Disease Control), depression (1 in 5 working moms is depressed) and pitifully low levels of leisure time. Lerner points out that American mothers work way more than women in other developed nations. Yet we do it all without the institutional support that is taken for granted elsewhere\u2014in contrast to 127 countries, the U.S. doesn&amp;#039;t even have a legally-sanctioned vacation policy.  Of course, parenthood brings its own unquantifiable rewards, and the experience is, by almost all accounts, worth the sacrifices. But Lerner&amp;#039;s point is that the sacrifices made by Americans are needlessly huge, and that our country demands that its citizens give up far more (more time\u2014including time to savor the experience, energy, money, and emotional balance) than those in other rich nations in order to have and raise a child.  These sacrifices are taking their toll on American women. Lerner cites the work of David Cotter at Union College who, working with other sociologists, found that despite the massive gains women have made since the 1970s, their progress seems to be stalling. In a 2006 paper called &amp;quot;The End of the U.S. Gender Revolution,&amp;quot; the researchers showed that while women are still crashing down doors in traditionally male-dominated professions, they&amp;#039;re now doing so more slowly that they had been. The number of women in state legislatures, which had climbed steadily since 1970&amp;#039;s, began to level off around 2000, which is also when the number of female state executives started to drop. Progress on the wage gap stopped around 2001, and a new gap started to open between men and women with children. Most importantly, the participation of women\u2014especially moms\u2014in the workforce decreased after 2000 (although it seems to have rebounded in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown).  Lerner makes the connection between these findings and the increasing difficulties in being a parent in the US. She spent more than three years analyzing our public policies (there was a big push for paid leave in 1919, but legislators figured it would be a part of the soon-to-be-passed universal health care plan, so why bother?), comparing them to the policies in other countries, and talking to parents in different parts of the U.S., at different income levels, about their struggles to balance work and family.  Families today need two incomes to get by, says Lerner, but holding on to that second job has become an almost Sisyphean challenge. Even our comparatively meager benefits are seen as &amp;quot;luxuries,&amp;quot; as many middle- and low-income women either don&amp;#039;t qualify for them or can&amp;#039;t afford to take advantage of them. For example, only 42 percent of working women in the U.S. are able stay home for the first 12 weeks of their infants&amp;#039; lives (Lerner talked to one Arizona pharmacist who went back to her job four weeks after delivering her son\u2014two weeks after the incision from her cesarean section had reopened), and half a million children are currently on waiting lists for subsidized child care.  Lerner says the overwhelmed moms she met at one of her book readings talked about a &amp;quot;conspiracy of silence.&amp;quot; They said that they felt that they had been denied access to information about the reality of what they were about to face as mothers. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very difficult to explore the facts on your own and do thorough research into working motherhood when you&amp;#039;re the midst of having a child. I wanted this book to give context to the experience of being a new mom,&amp;quot; Lerner says.  There are some who will probably chastise these audience members, who were mostly working mothers who can still find time to attend literary gatherings, for complaining\u2014especially after learning that these women can afford to raise their children in one of the most lovely, safe, upscale neighborhoods in New York City (where I live, for the record). And there are those who will claim that if women think it is so hard to raise children, they shouldn&amp;#039;t get pregnant in the first place.  Lerner is ready for these criticisms. &amp;quot;Blaming women for the decisions they make after they have children\u2014as well as for the choice to have children in the first place\u2014doesn&amp;#039;t only make women feel bad,&amp;quot; she writes. &amp;quot;It also takes the attention\u2014and thus, the onus for change\u2014off the real external problems that are causing women&amp;#039;s misery.&amp;quot;  That&amp;#039;s what this book is trying to do: rally mothers\u2014and dads, and people, like me, without children\u2014to advocate for changes like paid leave for caregivers, affordable, high-quality childcare, and flexible work schedules. Lerner took time off from promoting her book to speak with me about it.  ----  You had two babies during the time you spent working on this book\u2014despite being inundated with information about how hard it is to be a working mom.  Don&amp;#039;t let this scare you! I don&amp;#039;t want to bring down the fertility rate. We need to fix the system, not stop having children, of course.  That&amp;#039;s not what I usually hear when I confess my terror about balancing work and kids. I feel like the prevailing attitude in the U.S. is that if a woman isn&amp;#039;t prepared to suffer for her kids, then maybe she isn&amp;#039;t cut out for motherhood.  But parenthood shouldn&amp;#039;t come at that cost! There are lots of people who can love children and have the reward of raising children without making these terrible sacrifices, because their countries do things differently.  Part of your strategy with this book is to show readers how far behind the U.S. is in terms of how it treats parents and children. You write about the public, universal child-care programs that enroll 99 percent of three-to-five year olds of working parents in France and Belgium, and the policy that allows Dutch citizens to tailor any job to a less-than-full-time schedule. And these policies seem to pay off: One study of child benefits in 18 countries calculated that a 10 percent increase in child-benefit levels translated into a 25 percent increase in women&amp;#039;s fertility (and, incidentally, Dutch women fare far better than Americans on happiness measures). The standard American argument is that the reason other countries have more family-friendly policies is that they&amp;#039;re smaller, and that their fertility rates were dropping so alarmingly that their governments had to step in and do something. What needs to happen here?  I don&amp;#039;t think we&amp;#039;re going to hit a fertility crisis any time soon, but I do think we&amp;#039;re going to hit a crisis of misery. I&amp;#039;m appealing to people on the grounds that the treatment of parents here is wrong, inhumane, and unjust. That&amp;#039;s a hard case to make, so what we also need to talk about is the public role of women and how women function in our society. I think there is a clear case to be made that this is holding us back. If you&amp;#039;re holding back women in the workforce and public sphere, you&amp;#039;re holding back our country&amp;#039;s economy.  What was the reaction of people in other countries when you talked to them about the plight of American mothers?  When I would explain to people in Holland that we don&amp;#039;t have paid leave, they couldn&amp;#039;t even conceive of it. The U.S. is the only industrialized country and one of only five nations\u2014rich or poor\u2014not to grant new mothers paid time off. Then I was explaining to them the results of the Pew survey that said that 60 percent of mothers who work full time [in the U.S.] said they would prefer to be working part-time. But because our health insurance is often tied to full-time employment, and because there aren&amp;#039;t many decent part-time jobs, and because the jobs that women strive to get are usually inflexible, women end up working way more than they want to\u2014or sometimes way less than they want to, because if they decide they can&amp;#039;t keep up with children and full-time work, they quit. The Dutch were aghast.   One of the reasons I&amp;#039;m so freaked out about the idea of having a baby is that many of my friends found it so hard to work full-time after giving birth that \u2014 They left.  Yes. Although they wanted to stay at their jobs, they weren&amp;#039;t able to come up with situation that accommodated them and their families.  Yep. And it&amp;#039;s like, &amp;quot;but that&amp;#039;s their choice.&amp;quot; But it&amp;#039;s not exactly a choice, is it? The word I often use is &amp;quot;nudged out.&amp;quot; When inflexible workplace policies basically allow you no choice except to work way more than anybody would want to or to leave, then it&amp;#039;s not a choice.  ELLE editor Miranda Purves has used the phrase &amp;quot; choices that feel like traps.&amp;quot;  I totally agree. And it often feels like the only way you&amp;#039;re allowed to participate in the good jobs is to pretend you&amp;#039;re not a parent. In the book, I talk about women who go back to work and talk about putting their &amp;quot;game face&amp;quot; on and pretending they never had kids, and never talking about them.  The idea that women feel like they need to play down the fact that they&amp;#039;ve got kids at home in order to succeed at work kind of pushes us back into that old, &amp;#039;80s style of feminism, in which working women were trying so hard to prove that they were just as tough as the guys that they didn&amp;#039;t ask for special treatment\u2014treatment that they needed to succeed as working moms.  To be fair, I do think that&amp;#039;s partly why we are where we are\u2014the idea that women can&amp;#039;t be seen as gentle, or as nurturers in any way. I think the reasons for that come from the fact that women were facing such intense discrimination that there was little choice in the beginning but to focus on overturning those things at any cost. But in the process, there were some cases in which women were the ones who were going against things like laws that required paid leave. It was because they didn&amp;#039;t want to be accused of exceptionalism. I feel like there was a certain necessity back then to take the approach, but you can see now why that worked against us.  Why haven&amp;#039;t we established a new feminism that involves fighting for these things that so clearly benefit all parents? Why is it so hard to get women to feel like they should be fighting for policies like paid leave, childcare and flexible working schedules?  Part of the reason is that new moms are so overwhelmed with just getting by that there&amp;#039;s not a lot of energy left. And the other thing is that their energy has been misdirected: You have the ridiculous &amp;quot;mommy wars&amp;quot; thing, the idea that every mother&amp;#039;s enemy is some other camp of mothers. It&amp;#039;s a complete distraction from the fact that all of us are actually facing same problem\u2014which is basically a shortage of options that don&amp;#039;t suck. In terms of political rhetoric, this &amp;quot;pull yourselves up by your bootstraps&amp;quot; thing has been very successful. The Reagan-era idea that to be pro-family is to not support families has lingered on long after he did.  So what&amp;#039;s the way out?  People need to realize that this needs to be addressed not on the personal level\u2014we don&amp;#039;t need things like more caffeine, or better personal organizers. We need to change things on the policy level.  What groups are working this and what are they doing?  In terms of advocacy, there&amp;#039;s MomsRising.org and The National Partnership for Women and Families. The center for WorkLife Law at UC-Hastings is amazing. The lawyers there basically spearheaded the legal effort to prosecute companies like Novartis.  The drug company Novartis was recently sued by female employees for discrimination and was ordered to pay $250 million in punitive damages. The great irony was that Novartis had been recently recognized as one of the best and most accommodating companies for working mothers.  Yes. The idea that we can solve these problems by relying on voluntary measures from private companies is absurd. You can just point to the fact that so many companies cut benefits at random. The fact that most women don&amp;#039;t get to stay home [after giving birth] for 12 weeks or more makes it very clear that the system doesn&amp;#039;t work. Back to your question about how we are going to deal with it: I think part of it is telling the stories\u2014which is what I&amp;#039;m trying to do in the book\u2014in a way that features the inhumanity both to women and to children. When you are tearing newborns away from their parents, there isn&amp;#039;t a soul who can argue that that is an example of good family values. So I think there&amp;#039;s a lot of potential for bipartisan support\u2014at least of things like paid family leave.  Has there been any progress on these issues?  President Obama put some money in the budget\u2014it hasn&amp;#039;t passed yet\u2014which is seed money that states can use to set up paid family-leave programs. Ultimately, we need a national one, but this is a start. Obama has also called for childcare funding increases. I think that in those areas, we don&amp;#039;t have enough money or momentum, but we have some. The area I&amp;#039;m less optimistic about is part-time work regulations. There have been efforts to pass something called a &amp;quot;soft touch&amp;quot; law, which would grant employees the right to simply request part-time schedules, and even that has gotten a lot of push-back from employers and hasn&amp;#039;t gone anywhere. Part of the problem is that we haven&amp;#039;t yet figured out in this country how to provide benefits.  How do you respond to the popular &amp;quot;socialism&amp;quot; argument?  The countries with family-friendlier benefits have a range of political and economic systems. Since most other countries provide paid family leave, for instance, this group includes many countries that have decidedly capitalist systems. It is true that doing things like subsidizing childcare and granting paid time off for everyone after the birth or adoption of a child will cost money\u2014and that that money would come from tax dollars. But simply beefing up our support for families doesn&amp;#039;t make us socialist.  Well, how are we going to pay for these types of benefits, especially in this economy?  Tax dollars! People freak out about that, but it&amp;#039;s public money. We just had Defense Secretary Robert Gates talking about the huge amounts of waste in our military budget. If you ask almost anyone if we should be spending half a billion dollars for a mobile airport for planes we don&amp;#039;t use versus helping working families stay afloat, it seems like a no-brainer. People may say that the economic downturn means that we now don&amp;#039;t have the money to spend on these things. But the argument that not doing these things\u2014not putting money towards family-friendly policies\u2014has made our economy stronger, and that the U.S. is so strong because we don&amp;#039;t take care of families in this way...well, our economy apparently isn&amp;#039;t so strong. So that&amp;#039;s not really working. Also, a new Rockefeller study shows that there are really high levels of support for paid leave among different groups, including Evangelical Christians. In the study, 64 percent of conservatives, 74 percent of evangelical Christians, 81 percent of moderates, and 89 percent of liberals support paid leave and believe that businesses should be required to provide paid family leave and medical leave for every worker who needs it.  Where should women like me, without kids, direct our energy? I feel like this is our fight, too.   As much as these issues primarily affect mothers, if we are going to solve this, we really need to get men on and non-parents on board. Laws such paid family leave would include all caregivers. Everyone needs it, as there are all these people caring for parents and other sick relatives. You can get involved with groups like MomsRising, which would be happy to have you, kids or not. You can write directly to your legislature and tell them you want them to support these proposals in the budget. We also need to get a fire under the part-time work issues. I don&amp;#039;t know how else to do it besides to call attention to the fact that other countries do it so much better, and it makes life better for all different kinds of families. Actually, forget the family part\u2014it makes life more livable for everyone. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/interviews/a11211/a-mother-in-the-trenches/>