US mothers don't just need new policies – they need a cultural shift | Amy Westervelt
If we want to lift the pressure on American mothers we should look at how black women have been balancing motherhood and work for more than a century
It’s hard to skim any sort of media these days and not get the message that American mothers are struggling. Despite the country’s tendency to hold up motherhood as a blessed and cherished state, its policies and workplaces are continually flipping the bird to women who have children. And yet, simply fixing those policies, or replacing them with better ones – getting paid federal family leave in place, for example – is not necessarily the answer. Better policies would be great, of course, but in the absence of a more meaningful cultural shift, they will not fix the problem.
And fixing it is something we need to do, not just to make mothers less miserable, but also because the American economy needs both women’s labor and more children. Economists, journalists and politicians are finally starting to talk about one of the modern drivers of low birth rate in developed countries: the ever-widening gap between cost of living and wages, a gap that becomes more impossible to survive with every child added to a family.
from US news | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zjBlkO
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