It sells books, wins vote, calls attention to your work. It's a national preoccupation. It dominates every parent's life. It is the status quo. Society hasn't accommodated itself to this.
Children often bear the brunt.
And we must do something about it. That, however, gets one into all the intractables of public policy and workplace expectations and cultural assumptions. Much easier, instead, to dream that any day now we'll solve the problem by sending mothers back home. We'll go back, in other words, to the good old ways of doing things. Particularly hot are books that advise women that true happiness lies in submissiveness.