The Baby Boon: How Family-friendly America Cheats the Childless äâ¸â­ã¦â€“‡ã§â€°ë†

The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless
past Elinor Burkett
Free Press. 256 pp. $25.00

The American workplace has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past decade. In society to accommodate working parents—in particular, working mothers—many companies now provide their employees with generous motherhood exit, 24-hour interval-care centers, flexible working hours, and time off for school functions. Withal others offer such benefits equally $ane,000 gifts upon the nascency of a new kid, fiscal assistance for adoption, and interest-free loans for college tuition.

For the corporate managers who have brought about this transformation, equally for the politicians who have encouraged information technology past word and legislative deed, such policies demonstrate their strong commitment to the American family. Just for Elinor Burkett, a journalist who has specialized in criticizing feminism from within, the new "family-friendly" workplace points to something else entirely: a growing indifference to the needs and interests of those who take called to remain childless. The Baby Boon is meant to serve every bit a manifesto for this long-ignored and, nosotros are told, increasingly disgruntled class.

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As Burkett sees it, today'due south America consists of two distinct nations, one inhabited by parents and the other by the childless. Indeed, in her view, those without children—or the "child-free," as one of her interviewees proudly calls herself—are an oppressed minority, victims of a order run by self-involved infant-boomer parents.

Forced to endure a range of indignities in their private lives—having to shop and dine in the company of minors is on their list of complaints—the childless are about putupon, according to Burkett, at work There they are expected to put in longer hours, to skip weekends and holidays, and to cover for colleagues whose parental responsibilities pull them away to confer with a teacher, attend a piffling-league game, or stay abode with a newborn. Even more than galling is the fact that the childless are the ones who ultimately pay for their employers' family-friendliness, since the expensive perks enjoyed exclusively by parents tend to depress wages beyond the board.

To make matters worse, parents bear witness no gratitude for the special privileges they receive. They treat the childless with sick-disguised scorn and, filled with an invincible sense of entitlement, continually demand still more concessions to their family needs. One woman, Burkett relates, sued her employer for declining to provide a private room in which she could pump breast milk—a violation, she claimed, of both her civil rights and the Americans with Disabilities Human action.

Though a feminist herself, Burkett places much of the blame for this situation on contemporary feminism. Willfully blind to life's inevitable trade-offs, the movement'due south leaders accept failed to speak common sense to women, instead promoting unchecked career advocacy as the absolute right of every working mother. Those who exercise not toe the movement's line—like Joyce Purnick, the New York Times editor who recently scandalized a graduating class at Barnard by telling them that her own success had come about just because, beingness childless, she was able to give all her energy to journalism—adventure ostracism from the fold. Their crime, according to feminist doyenne Betty Friedan: "pitting women against women."

Having come of political age in the 1970's, Burkett finds it ironic that a movement whose original appeal rested in big office on questioning the primacy of motherhood has now embraced "the maternal mystique," accepting motherhood equally "the highest idea." Feminists may effort to disguise this fact by speaking in the proper name of "parents" or "families," Burkett writes, merely in reality they accept just imported into the workplace the "rigid female stereotype" that a woman is, above all, a female parent. Petty wonder, she archly observes, that in advocating "affirmative activeness" for mothers, feminists take often constitute themselves in league with the benighted conservative advocates of "family values."

The Baby Benefaction is a lively read—besides lively, in fact, for its ain good. Filled with overheated prose and exaggerated examples, it is the sort of book that may rally sympathizers but nevertheless leaves 1 wondering almost its author'due south reliability.

Burkett is unconvincing, for one thing, in her try to portray a simmering class carve up in the workplace. After all, it is not only the childless who make full in when a parent takes time off from work—colleagues with grown children or with less urgent family unit concerns deport the load likewise. Nor is it true, as Burkett asserts, that girls are now existence taught "that women cannot be happy or fulfilled without children." To the reverse, the clear bulletin being communicated to girls today is that they should set their sights on a high-powered career; spousal relationship and motherhood are, at best, an reconsideration.

Where Burkett does perform a useful service is in reminding us how much family policy in the U.S. has been transformed over the last generation—and how powerful are the forces working to advance the pace of change. In much of Europe (as many American feminists accusingly point out), all parents—and not only those working for progressive corporations—are given twelve months of paid exit when a baby is born, subsidized day care, and a generous allowance for each child. If the present tendency holds—and there is no reason to call back that American women will somehow end wanting to "take it all"—this may exist the shape of things to come here as well.

Unfortunately, Burkett is equally ill-equipped to evaluate this change as are the feminists she criticizes. She, as well, operates by a moral calculus based almost exclusively on the welfare of adults. If parents want to exit their two-month-former in 24-hour interval care for ten hours a twenty-four hours, that is okay with her so long as no 1 asks her to pay for it. Having children, Burkett avers, is simply another "lifestyle" pick, one that differs little from whatsoever other expensive hobby.

The unspoken and, to say the to the lowest degree, highly dubious assumption hither is that whether children grow up at home with their mother, in the keeping of a nanny, or in i of the many institutions that now serve in loco parentis for working couples, they will somehow turn out just fine in the finish. The resilience of this self-serving idea, not just amidst gimmicky feminists just amidst critics like Burkett, suggests that despite the newfound "family-friendliness" of the American workplace, we still take a long way to go in recovering the near basic wisdom about the needs of children and families.

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Source: https://www.commentary.org/articles/kay-hymowitz/the-baby-boom-by-elinor-burkett/

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