The new family unit
The basic family unit as we know it today has been found in every race or tribe since people first inhabited the earth. The family unit is, and always has been, the cornerstone of our society and its main function is to create a secure environment in which children can be raised.
How a family evolves
© Jupiter
There is no one to whom the family is more important than a baby; it forms her entire universe. Within the family your child learns all the basic aspects of human relationships. And within its security, your child learns about the good things in life: the happiness, the love and the laughter, as well as the bad things, the problems, the tensions and the anxieties. As your child grows, the family will provide the steadying, optimistic, strengthening influence that will help her cope with new and possibly difficult situations. It should always be the sanctuary to which your child can return when any conflicts seem too confusing to sort out.
The way the family is constructed and the roles played by the members of it, vary from culture to culture and family to family. In modern Western society the man has traditionally taken the role of breadwinner, provider and worker while the woman was the housekeeper and child-rearer and was mainly confined to the home. While until not long ago society accepted this as the norm, it is in fact a very recent development in the evolution of the family.
The family unit
Prior to the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, the family was a working unit with mother and father and children all working towards the common good. Because of this, many aspects of family life were shared experiences; no distinction was made between worker and nurturer of children as we have it today. Women and children were very often out in the fields as well as the men, and there was never a sense at all that a woman's duty was to rear children and do the household chores. It was a much more egalitarian arrangement.
The Industrial Revolution tore apart this happy working family unit. Instead of being together the family was split up. The wage earner, of whichever sex, but usually the man, had to go to the factory in order to do his work instead of being close to his family. At about the same time parents abdicated their role as educators of children to schools, and so the family lost much of its educational function. Thirdly, the mother was often left at home with the children and because the wage earner had to work long hours, she had to shoulder most of the responsibility for childrearing, for everyday care and for discipline. Continuing industrialization and urbanization, and the increased scope for travel, meant that families became geographically separate. As a result mothers could no longer rely on their mothers, sisters and grandmothers for help as they had done in the past. They were left alone. The family unit became small, isolated and unsupported; for the mother it became boring, repetitive, tedious and frustrating. She had no time to herself, suffered from a loss of identity and had no other outlet for her skills and capabilities. Recently, and largely because of the feminist movement, there has been a move back to the kind of egalitarian marriage that existed before.
The modern mother
Twenty-first century mothers can be divided into two main categories. The first consists of those who feel that while their children are very young they want to look after them themselves and they feel that this activity is the most worthwhile job that they can do. However, even a mother who loves her child dearly will be prepared to admit that looking after young children isn't easy. A woman who finds herself a mother shortly after leaving a job is unlikely to be well prepared for the demands, not to mention the isolation of being a mother.
Motherhood has its pleasures and fulfilment but it's very tough. It's 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's repetitious and tedious and extremely demanding and wearing. No mother undervalues what she is doing but society does. Consequently when a young mother, particularly if she has been well trained to do a job outside the home, is asked what she is doing and all she can say is that she's a mother, she feels that the admission classifies her as inferior to women who are holding down a job. It's up to society to take a more realistic view of motherhood than the present rather idealized one.
The working mother
The other category is the working mother. For some reason the term “working mother” is still a pejorative one in our society. The general view seems to be that if women aren't prepared to devote themselves entirely to the upbringing of their children it's felt that they aren't maternal, that they're selfish and heartless.
If we go back to the pre-Industrial Revolution family we find that mothers were always working mothers. They did an equal amount of work to the father and they shared the work of the family with the father. It's a natural instinct for a mother to want to go on working even though she has had children. Also, many women today work because they have to; either because they have no partner or because there is insufficient income. Women have always made a vital contribution to the support of their families, whether it was growing food, spinning wool, making pots, weaving cotton, grinding flour, curing bacon or tanning leather. Over the centuries the economic importance of women has been equal to their domestic importance. It's only now that our priorities have become rather muddled.
Women who work nearly always have a strong drive to be independent outside the home. They want to have their own lives, their own interests and their own source of income. They cherish their own area of activity where they are respected and their efforts are prized and where they are needed for their skills and expertise. These are perfectly valid and reasonable motives for wanting to return to work after a child is born. However, the woman who opts to do this is putting herself into the category of people who work hardest and are the most stressed. In Western society today the hardest-working person is the working mother. She has two full-time jobs; that of a mother and that of a wage-earner.
The modern father
This is a father who takes responsibility for the general care of his child. Fewer fathers nowadays are prepared to be strangers to their children, missing out on all the good times in the family and, most important, missing out on their children growing up. The modern father is active rather than passive. He will arrange his day to come home early from work to see his children or work part-time so he can share the childcare with his partner. He'll spend as much time as he can playing with his children, showing them new things, helping them with their hobbies, taking them with him when he enjoys his own. He will participate from day one with the care of the baby, with nappy changing, with getting up in the middle of the night, doing the two a.m. feed, helping with bathtimes, reading stories, playing games and singing songs before bedtime. The modern father is a full-time parent, not a part-time stranger, and everyone in the family benefits from this.
A father who has a high interest in the pregnancy generally stays interested after the birth. Interest is positively related to how much he holds the baby in the first six weeks and whether he goes to the baby when she cries. Not unexpectedly, his attitude affects his partner's enjoyment of pregnancy and motherhood. The happier he is about it and the more he looks forward to fatherhood, the more she enjoys the first weeks of her baby's life too and inevitably, the better the start for the baby. The better the father is at playing his role, the more important he becomes.
New Babycare
Copyright © 2009 Dorling Kindersley
Text copyright © 2009 Miriam Stoppard
Posted 03.11.2010
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