A practical present for mom
IT'S MOTHER'S DAY, the day we celebrate the sacrifices involved in being a female parent. Meanwhile, for the rest of the year, our education policies undermine mothers, especially those who work.
Yes, mothers work. Seventy percent of children live in families where all adults have jobs. And yet our schools, like our workplaces, are still set up as if there were someone home all day to care for anyone in need. So families scramble to close the gaps in care.
But the difficulties facing working parents can't be solved by individuals alone. Consider the bizarre mismatch between our 21st century's 24-7 workday and our schools' 19th-century agrarian schedules. Why are children still let out of schools at 2:30 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents' jobs don't end until 5 p.m. or later? In 2006, only 1.6 percent of American workers were down on the farm, and yet schools still follow that vestigial schedule. As a result, millions of American working families are forced to patch together afterschool care plans, one by one.
If parents are well off, they shell out big bucks for au pairs, nannies, enrichment programs, or -- even in high-end districts like Newton or Wellesley -- send their children to private schools with family-friendly afternoon schedules. Some lower-income families work tag-team schedules, so that someone's always at home, even if that consigns the parents to a mere virtual marriage. Other women take "mothers' hours" jobs that pay less than "regular" jobs, as if the need to care for children were a private disability rather than a demand facing 75 percent of American workers at some phase in their working lives.
In some Massachusetts communities, the 3-5 pm problem may be erased for a different reason: student performance. Ten schools -- in Boston, Cambridge, Fall River, Malden, and Worcester -- are among the first in the nation to try out extended days to help improve learning, the Globe has reported. If students learn better with longer days, that's great. But aligning the school day and the standard workday has its own logic, with or without any educational changes.
Or consider how badly the United States lags other rich nations in early-childhood education. Publicly subsidized early-childhood offerings start at age 1 in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden; 2 in France; 2 1/2 in Belgium; and 3 in Italy and Germany. Their teachers are trained to a high-quality standard, and paid well enough to stay longer than a couple of months.
This may sound like mommy porn to time-starved Americans, but the results are impressive. According to a report to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, studies have found that in France, enrollment by age 2 (instead of 3 ) meant children "significantly outperformed their counterparts . . . in evaluations of cognitive development, French language, attitudes toward school, and mathematics." In Sweden, studies found that if children head into day care between ages 6 and 12 months, they get higher aptitude and social and emotional adjustment scores than those kept home. One of our nation's largest employers, the Department of Defense, offers a higher-quality, more cost-effective child-care system than that of any state, according to the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies. The Defense Department's training for family-care providers and its cost-effective subsidies were, until the war, a big incentive for parents to re-up. Does that make the Pentagon a socialist employer -- or a practical one?
Why can't the school day match the workday? Why can't the United States invest in children, not as cute but optional accessories but as the folks who will eventually pay for Social Security and Meals on Wheels for all of us, even for nonparents like me? Yes, there are obstacles to both these proposals. So let's have those discussions -- rather than treating today's system as divinely inspired, when it's simply left over from when children were essential labor.
When working parents' shared problems are privatized, real family values get ground to bits in a titanic clash between work and home. Roses and chocolate are all very nice. But wouldn't sensible school policies be a real Mother's Day present?
E.J. Graff, senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, collaborated on Evelyn Murphy's book "Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men -- And What To Do About It." 
