<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Taking care of your family shouldn&amp;#039;t have to be an Olympic feat,&amp;quot; says journalist Sharon Lerner. But in her new book, The War on Moms: On Life in a Family-Unfriendly Nation, Lerner explores the backflips American moms do just to get by: juggling schedules and enlisting neighbors to help when they can&amp;#039;t find affordable child care, trying to keep their families healthy with no medical insurance, and managing the guilt from not being able to do it all. Despite the problems she saw, Lerner also discovered reasons to be hopeful. Here&amp;#039;s what she learned from moms around the country. A lot has been written about the &amp;quot;mommy wars,&amp;quot; working moms battling stay-at-home moms over who&amp;#039;s a better parent. Do you think the animosity has been exaggerated? Absolutely! We have so many more similarities than differences: All mothers want what&amp;#039;s best for our kids, and we also want income and personal satisfaction. But when it comes down to it, we either have to work more or less than we want because there aren&amp;#039;t enough decent part-time jobs. In the European Union, the government protects part-time workers. You can&amp;#039;t get demoted for asking for a part-time schedule or be forced to take a lower-status position.  You cite shocking cases of moms trying to find child care. How can this be resolved? No one expects parents to shoulder the cost of education by themselves; that&amp;#039;s why there are public schools. But younger kids also have needs, and both parents usually have to work. President Obama seems to get this issue: In his proposed budget, he has allocated $1.6 billion to getting families off the waiting list for subsidized child care, and he has asked to increase the tax deduction for child care for middle-class families from 20 percent to 35 percent. It&amp;#039;s a step in the right direction. What would you say to people who believe it&amp;#039;s not the government&amp;#039;s responsibility to fund social services like health care? The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not have universal health care, and we are one of the only countries \u2014 rich or poor \u2014 that doesn&amp;#039;t have paid maternity leave. If they can do it, we can too. Child care is a little different, but most other wealthy countries do far better than we do. I&amp;#039;m not saying it&amp;#039;s every mother&amp;#039;s birthright to have a full-time nanny, but the truth is that good child care is out of reach for most families, and we need to solve this as a country.  How, as a country, did we get here? There actually were pushes for paid maternity leave almost 100 years ago and during World War II. And we came close to instituting national child care around 1970. But the momentum largely came to a standstill in the &amp;#039;80s, when a strong cultural attitude arose that family needs are private and shouldn&amp;#039;t be addressed by the government. But with so many women in the workforce now, it&amp;#039;s time to redefine family values. You had two babies while working on this book. How did that change your outlook? Having my kids definitely made these issues more vivid for me. There were ironies along the way, like the time I was supposed to moderate a panel on child care and my babysitter didn&amp;#039;t show up. I remember thinking, This would be funny if I weren&amp;#039;t so late!  What are you most hopeful about? It&amp;#039;s amazing how hard women work to help each other out. They&amp;#039;re so creative even with limited resources. The average mom has an incredible skill set \u2014 making one jar of peanut butter last for a month, figuring out what to do when she runs out of diapers, and managing to get it all done, as one mom said, &amp;quot;on four hours of sleep and four cups of coffee.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/life/mom-kids/advice/a6084/raising-kids/>