Writing at The American Scene in response to my post about women doing five times more child care than men, Matt Zeitlin suggests that equally shared parenting might, in some way, be a negative for children. "How much autonomy or potential flourishing should women give up for the sake of their kids?" Zeitlin muses.
That's essentially the John Podhoretz line on Lisa Belkin's Times Magazine piece. Podhoretz wrote:
No one claims in the course of this piece that it is better for the children that fathers and mothers share all tasks equally. That would be an interesting piece, with an interesting argument. The sole issue for Belkin is the burden placed on the woman in a marriage, and how it might interfere with her self-actualization. The women in the article all have husbands who have bought into the equal-parenting line. And yet, all they do is whine.
Charming. In any case, what Podhoretz suggests would be an interesting piece, but let me ask Podhoretz and Zeitlin this: Why should it be women, not men, who compromise on "flourishing" in order to raise children? Is there any evidence at all that this system is more beneficial than equally shared parenting for either individual kids or for society? The answer, I think, is that there is no evidence, since we have never truly experimented, on a large scale, with a more egalitarian way of raising children. My hunch, though, is that children gain an awful lot by spending equal amounts of time being cared for by each parent.
--Dana Goldstein
