Reframing the Work-Family Conflict Debate by Rejecting the Ideal Parent Norm

Introduction 48I. Work-Family Conflict: Why Current Solutions Are Not Working 49II. Mythologizing the Ideal Parent: A History of Childrearing in theUnited States 54A. 1800-1900: Pre-Industrial Parenting 54B. Industrialization's Impact on Parenting 57C. The Rise of Modem Parenting 61D. WWII to Modernity: Maternity Reigns 63E. 1990s to Now: The Move to Exhaustive Care 67III. Unpacking The Ideal Parent Norm 69A. Only a Mother's Love: The Norm of Maternal Care 69B. Don't Worry, Mommy's Here: The Norm of NonDelegation 74C. Love's Labor: The Norm of Exhaustive Care 77IV. How the Ideal Parent Norm Limits Work-Family Conflict Discourse 79V. Reframing Work-Family Conflict 83A. Beyond Non-Delegation: Increasing Communal andCommunity-Based Child Care Options 84B. Beyond Maternal Bias: Reviving the Call for Universal Infant Care 86C. Beyond Exhaustive Care: Empowering Non-Parental Caretakers 88Conclusion 89IntroductionDespite the steady advance of women into the paid market sphere, it is widely recognized that women with parenting responsibilities are not succeeding in the workforce on equal terms with men who also have parenting responsibilities. Scholars and activists engaged in work-family conflict discourse have proposed a wide variety of measures to combat the inequities women encounter when trying to juggle workplace and parenting demands. However, overwhelmingly, these proposals seek to address work-family conflict in only one of two ways: either by redefining workplace culture and norms to accommodate working mothers or by redistributing parenting labor by incentivizing increased participation in (and acceptance of) caretaking by fathers. While these efforts are valuable and necessary, I argue that they are ultimately insufficient to solve the work-family conflict problem because they fail to critically examine or address the burdensome and obsolescent normative assumptions about parenting that have come to dominate work-family conflict discourse both academically and in the popular press.Part I of this Article describes why work-family conflict solutions have stalled, and how normative assumptions about parenting, what I call the "Ideal Parent norm," have contributed to this stalemate. The Ideal Parent norm prevalent in work-family conflict discourse today valorizes a timeintensive, parent-centric, and maternal-dependent model of childrearing that demands more resources than ever before from those individuals carrying the biological, legal, and/or cultural label of "parent."This has not always been the case. Over the last few decades, the socalled "minimum needs" of children have expanded and become more complex, specialized, demanding, and expensive; yet parents alone have been expected to assume these additional obligations and fulfill these ballooning needs, whatever the economic or personal cost to parents.Reflecting on the evolution of parenthood in the United States is instructive for this project, which I undertake in Part II. The benefit of viewing this historical narrative in retrospect is that it becomes clear that this expansion of parental expectations and responsibilities has not evolved in direct response to any evidence-based consensus about the developmental needs of children. Rather, various parenting norms have been championed at different times to advance socially and historically specific agendas, often at the expense of women's political agency, workforce participation, or ability to self-fashion as anything other than a mother or potential mother.The Ideal Parent norm that dominates the mainstream today sets an impossibly high bar for individual parents of non-delegated, motherdependent, resource-intensive care. I unpack each of the normative assumptions underlying the Ideal Parent norm in Section III, which I shorthand in this Article as Non-Delegation, Maternal Bias, and Exhaustive Care. …