juxtablog

When discussing the choice to work or not to work, the refusal to acknowledge that the choice isn’t available to everyone doesn’t feel like an oversight — it feels like the silent treatment. In the face of past acknowledgments that differences in class are important, the decision to blatantly ignore the impact of class should be viewed as a movement. The result is an explicit and inexplicable rejection of the view that class should matter in discussing the expectation of mothers to stay home. In essence, it’s an onslaught of negative third-wave feminism, which assumes everyone has the financial security to make a choice and tells low-income and poor mothers that this doesn’t concern them.

The problem is that it does concern them. The Pew Research Center recently released a survey that shows mothers who work full time rate themselves lower on the question, “How good a job do you feel you’ve done so far as a parent?,” than mothers who work part time or who stay home.

Among the mothers who reported that they feel like they are coming up short are those who never got to make a choice not to work full time. The Mommy Wars has succeeded in permeating the discourse on motherhood enough that everyone is getting the message that working mothers are sacrificing their family’s well-being for their careers. The conclusion that mothers can’t have it all — they can’t be dedicated mothers and career women — is especially damaging to those mothers who are essentially being told that success in motherhood is a function of their financial status.

Source: The working wounded / Most women don’t have a choice to stay home with kids

When discussing the choice to work or not to work, the refusal to acknowledge that the choice isn’t available to everyone doesn’t feel like an oversight — it feels like the silent treatment. In the face of past acknowledgments that differences in class are important, the decision to blatantly ignore the impact of class should be viewed as a movement. The result is an explicit and inexplicable rejection of the view that class should matter in discussing the expectation of mothers to stay home. In essence, it’s an onslaught of negative third-wave feminism, which assumes everyone has the financial security to make a choice and tells low-income and poor mothers that this doesn’t concern them.

The problem is that it does concern them. The Pew Research Center recently released a survey that shows mothers who work full time rate themselves lower on the question, “How good a job do you feel you’ve done so far as a parent?,” than mothers who work part time or who stay home.

Among the mothers who reported that they feel like they are coming up short are those who never got to make a choice not to work full time. The Mommy Wars has succeeded in permeating the discourse on motherhood enough that everyone is getting the message that working mothers are sacrificing their family’s well-being for their careers. The conclusion that mothers can’t have it all — they can’t be dedicated mothers and career women — is especially damaging to those mothers who are essentially being told that success in motherhood is a function of their financial status.

Source: The working wounded / Most women don’t have a choice to stay home with kids

After the 2003-05 period in which the HHS ads were aired, the proportion of mothers who breast-fed in the hospital after their babies were born dropped, from 70 percent in 2002 to 63.6 percent in 2006, according to statistics collected in Abbott Nutrition’s Ross Mothers Survey, an industry-backed effort that has been measuring breast-feeding rates for more than 30 years. In 2002, 33.2 percent of women were doing any breast-feeding at six months; by 2006, that rate had declined to 30 percent.

    The World Health Organization recommends that, if at all possible, women breast-feed their infants exclusively for at least six months.

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    The breast-feeding ad campaign originated in a formal “Blueprint for Action on Breastfeeding” released in 2000 by David Satcher, who had been appointed surgeon general by President Bill Clinton. The Office on Women’s Health convinced the nonprofit Ad Council to donate $30 million in media time, and it hired an ad agency to work alongside scientists from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and elsewhere.

    Officials met with dozens of focus groups before concluding that the best way to influence mothers was to delineate in graphic terms the risks of not breast-feeding, an approach in keeping with edgy Ad Council campaigns on smoking, seat belts and drunken driving. For example, an ad portraying a nipple-tipped insulin bottle said, “Babies who aren’t breastfed are 40% more likely to suffer Type 1 diabetes.”

    Gina Ciagne, the office’s public affairs specialist for the campaign, said, “We were ready to go with our risk-based campaign – making breast-feeding a real public health issue – when the formula companies learned about it and came in to complain. Before long, we were told we had to water things down, get rid of the hard-hitting ads and generally make sure we didn’t somehow offend.”

Source: HHS Toned Down Breast-Feeding Ads at Urging of Formula Industry