Mom's having her first baby at 50 and Dad's starting on his third set of kids. What are these newfangled versions of mother and father teaching all of us about parenting?
For many of us teetering on the edge of the 21st century, there's something quaintly old-fashioned about Mother's Day and Father's Day, and it's not only the flowery odes and cards. It's that two days don't seem enough anymore. Two days--a single date in May, 24 hours in June--may once have been adequate to celebrate motherhood and fatherhood, simple and solid as they were then. But in an age of surrogate mothers and single fathers, stepparents and "social" parents, lesbian moms and long-distance dads, we'd need weeks to do everyone justice.
In this welter of new ways to be mom or dad, one question often gets overlooked: how have these permutations changed parenting itself? Have the man-made miracles of assisted reproduction drawn mothers and children closer together, or pushed them farther apart? Have the social shifts of the the last 30 years made men better fathers, or made them more likely to leave?
In this special section, Frederic Golden and Annie Murphy Paul take a look at postmodern parenting: what it means for moms and dads, for their children, and for the rest of us.
MOMS
It may be the world's second-oldest profession, as Erma Bombeck once wryly called it, but there's a lot that's new about motherhood these days. Reproductive technology is permitting postmenopausal women to become pregnant, bestowing twins and triplets on women who thought they were infertile, creating families with two mothers and no fathers, save an anonymous sperm donor. But have these innovations changed how moms do what they've always done: raise and nurture children? Here, a look at today's high-tech motherhood:
Test-Tube Moms
Since the first baby conceived through in-vitro fertilization--Louise Joy Brown, now 21 years old--hundreds of thousands of lives have had their start in petri dishes. There are enough IVF children around, in fact, for psychologists to begin studying them and their parents.
The results: so far, so good. The mothering given to children conceived through assisted reproductive technology, or ART, is just as effective as that given to naturally conceived children--and maybe more. Research shows that ART mothers express greater warmth toward their children, are more emotionally involved with them, interact with them more, experience less stress related to parenting and report greater feelings of parental competence.
That may be because their children were so desperately wanted. "People who are willing to go through infertility treatments, which can be very expensive and can stretch over many years, are those who are really committed to becoming parents," says Susan Golombok, Ph.D., of City University in London, a leading researcher in the field. "Then when they do become parents, they've waited so long for their children that they're just thrilled to have them."
The time and expense involved in ART influences those who use it in another way: they are likely to be older and more affluent than mothers in the general population, and for that reason may be able to offer their children advantages that younger, poorer mothers cannot. Dorothy Greenfeld, M.D., an obstetrician at the Yale University School of Medicine, finds that these mothers' marriages may actually be the stronger for their trials: "They've had to look at issues that one could argue other couples don't face, and work through them together," she says.
ART mothers may also feel personally empowered by the process, by the fact that they had any choices at all about how to treat their infertility. The advances of ART can be seen as cousin to the contraceptives developed earlier in this century that allowed women for the first time to control when they became pregnant. Like the Pill, assisted reproductive technology has allowed women who would once have been at the mercy of their anatomies to have biology at their beck and call.
Older Moms
ART has also been a boon to mothers who are not so much infertile as post-fertile: those who are past menopause but still want to bear children. The implantation of donor eggs has allowed women to become pregnant at ages far beyond what we think of as a woman's childbearing years: 50, 55, even 63 in the case of a California woman who lied to her doctor about her age.
As the age at which American women first become mothers rises ever higher, postmenopausal women who conceive with the help of ART are on the leading edge, enacting in exaggerated form the delights and drawbacks of delayed childbearing.
There are still too few of these mothers to support systematic study, but early observation suggests that many of the qualities typical of mothers who use assisted reproductive technology--greater wealth and life experience, a profound commitment to parenting, a grateful joy born of the long wait for a child--are found in older ART moms as well. Pregnancy and childbirth are harder on the health of older mothers, however, and the physical demands of caring for young children may exhaust them more easily.
Late-in-life offspring may also exhaust financial resources: though the fee paid for donor eggs generally ranges between $2,000 and $5,000, one particularly picky couple has offered $50,000 for the eggs of a tall Ivy League student with SAT scores over 1400. The costs of these babies don't end with their conception, of course. Economist David Card, Ph.D., of the University of California-Berkeley, who studies the financial burdens of older parents, predicts that older mothers will have to work five to 10 years longer than other mothers to pay for their postmenopausal progeny. Still, the increasing number of older mothers suggests that many find it worth the price.
Lesbian Moms
At one time, lesbian mothers were themselves a late-blooming breed: they usually conceived their children in a heterosexual union, only later discovering or declaring themselves homosexual. But assisted reproductive technology has created a whole new class of lesbian moms, who use a donor's sperm to conceive and raise a child in a lesbian-headed household from the very beginning.
Many studies over many years have found that lesbian moms do just as good a job of raising their kids as heterosexual moms do: their children don't differ significantly on measures of intellectual development, gender identity, sexual orientation, peer group, or self-esteem. Not surprisingly, the kids of lesbians seem to have a higher degree of tolerance for differences in others.
The question now occupying many researchers who study lesbian motherhood is whether those who have children through donor insemination differ from those who conceived the old-fashioned way. They do--but in ways that affect parenting only indirectly.
While members of the first group are usually firmly ensconced in their identities as lesbians, and have a committed female partner with whom they plan to co-parent the child, more recently emerged lesbians may still be dealing with the emotional fallout from two major life transitions. "Divorced lesbian mothers have come through an experience of great change: the divorce or breakup with the father of their children, and their own coming-out as lesbians," says Charlotte Patterson, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Virginia who has studied both kinds of lesbian mothers.
Psychiatrist Nanette Gartrell, M.D., of the University of California-San Francisco, has examined the effects of discrimination on lesbian mothers and their children. She adds that recently declared and recently divorced lesbians may also have to confront external and internalized homophobia for the first time, and may be caught up in custody battles in which their sexual orientation is an issue (in many states, the law permits the removal of children from homes with a lesbian mother). "Any sort of psychological or interpersonal struggle on the part of the mother is going to have an impact on the child," she notes. Lesbians who conceive through donor insemination, on the other hand, are largely free from such dilemmas.
They're also raising their children in a remarkably egalitarian environment: studies have shown that chores and child care are much more evenly divided in lesbian households than in heterosexual homes. In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same: it's still mom who cleans and cooks, but sometimes there are two moms who are performing the tasks.
Multiple-Birth Moms
Multiple birth mothers must often find themselves recalling the old chestnut that advises us to be careful what we wish for. Like other ART mothers, they desperately wanted a child, and often went to great effort and expense to get one. Instead of one, however, they got two, or three, or four, or five... on up to the Chukwu octuplets conceived with the help of fertility drugs and born last December in Houston.
The number of multiple births has skyrocketed over the past decade, partly because more older women are having babies: the rate of twin births rises with the age of the mother. But the increase is also attributable to the use of fertility drugs that stimulate the ovaries to release more eggs, and to assisted reproduction techniques that place more than one egg at a time in a woman's body
Studies of these mothers find that they all have at least one thing in common: they're tired. Really tired. Research also shows that they're more likely to be depressed; in one study, self-reports of depression were five times higher among mothers of twins than in those who had given birth to a single child.
Feelings of fatigue and depression do take a toll: twins are less likely to be breast-fed, receive fewer demonstrations of affection, and engage in fewer verbal exchanges with their parents than singletons. Twins are also more likely to be abused, due no doubt to the additional stress their parents experience. What's more, the arrival of twins can mean that the needs of other children in the family are neglected, especially in the case of a single older child. The trauma these children can experience as a result of the sudden redirection of parental energies toward junior siblings has been termed "twinshock."
Like women who give birth as they're approaching 60, multiple-birth moms throw into high relief the dilemmas experienced by more ordinary mothers. As increasing numbers of American women juggle the demands of career and children, fatigue and depression are becoming more pressing issues for moms and kids alike. The advice offered by Case Western Reserve pediatrician Robert Williams, M.D., to mothers of twins applies to all parents: "Don't be afraid or ashamed to ask for help."
And if it's any consolation, mothers of multiples can remind themselves that it does get easier. "Most of the difficulties parents have with twins come in the first two or three years," says Williams. "They need so much attention, and it's such an intense experience."
"Intense" seems an apt description of most encounters with reproductive technology, in which fear and hope and the longing for a child all meet. In that way, of course, it's not so different from motherhood as it's been described in ancient fables, in Biblical parables--or for that matter, in the books of Erma Bombeck.
DADS
Once we all knew what a dad was: he was the guy who married mom, who gave you your eyes or your smile or your sense of humor, who made you eat your spinach and do your homework, who was always around somewhere, puttering in the basement or grilling burgers out back.
Not anymore. Today's fathers run the gamut, from sperm-bank donors to superdads--and there are a lot of men in the middle, trying to puzzle out the meaning of modern fatherhood. They're getting some help from psychologists, biologists and sociologists, whose research has something to tell us all about the ties that bind father to child. Here, a family portrait of today's fathers:
The Distant Dad
Throughout the 1980s, the deadbeat dad vied with the welfare queen and the tax-and-spend liberal for the prize of public enemy number one. Now his numbers are on the wane, thanks to stronger child-support enforcement efforts--and we're left with what may be a bigger problem. How do we ensure that these "nonresidential fathers" (the new, more neutral term) contribute time and care as well as money to their kids?
One of the keys lies in what would seem an unlikely place: the women these men have left or been left by. Even in intact families, research shows, mothers act as gatekeepers, supervising access to children. Their authority is further increased when they have primary custody of children, as is still the case in 87% of divorces. A friendly or at least civil relationship between ex-spouses can keep those gates from clanging shut. "Former partners don't have to be intimate or close," declares Constance Ahrons, Ph.D., a sociologist at the University of Southern California. "They just need to be mature enough to separate out marital issues from parenting issues, and put the parenting issues on the front burner."
Some state and local governments are trying to make that effort easier, by requiring all divorcing couples with children to draw up a "parenting plan." "It's partly the outcome of the plan that's valuable, the set of decisions that are made about the children and how they will be cared for," says Ross Thompson, Ph.D., psychology professor at the University of Nebraska. "But just as important is the process. In the midst of negotiations to go their separate ways, the couple has to make plans for how they are going to continue to maintain contact."
The Disney Dad
Divorced fathers who do stay involved tend to "think that if they fill visits with fun activities, the child will look forward to seeing him," says Thompson. "But the fact is, those kinds of activities can be stressful. They're nice on special occasions, but they're not the basis of an ongoing relationship." Psychologists blame the Disney Dad syndrome on the visitation system itself, with its rigid and unnatural limits on the non-custodial parent's role. "Why should we be surprised when time passes and fewer and fewer fathers maintain contact?" asks Thompson.
What's needed is an improved system of shared custody. One new arrangement, now being experimented with by several states, grants responsibility for major decisions--where children go to school, what kind of medical treatment they receive--to both parents, even if the child lives with only one. "If parenting is about anything, it's about deep involvement and intimate contact, being knit into the everyday experience of a child's life," Thompson says. "And how can you do that if you're only visiting?"
The Serial Dad
The serial dad is of the love-the-one-you're-with school: he has children with one woman, then moves on to another and yet another, investing his time and money in the family of the moment.
These men may never have come to see themselves as fathers in any meaningful way, say sociologists. When fathers feel certain in their abilities as parents, when their place in their children's lives is clear and unambiguous, and when they feel satisfied with their interactions with their children, they are likely to stay involved with their offspring, according to Randy Leite, program coordinator of human development and family science at Ohio State University.
Some social scientists believe such confidence can be instilled by actively teaching parenting skills. Across the country, fathering programs like "It's My Child, Too" at Purdue University and "Making Room For Daddies" at the Center for Men in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are teaching men, especially those who are young and unmarried, how to be a father in full.
The Single Dad
Single fathers were once an amusing oddity: usually widowers, they were portrayed in popular culture as hopelessly inept with diapers and blushingly awkward with talks about the birds and the bees. But times have changed. According to a report released by the Census Bureau, the number of single fathers jumped 25% in three years, from 1.7 million in 1995 to 2.1 million in 1998.
Moreover, many of these men are taking on the role for new reasons: not because their wives have died but because judges have awarded them custody. That change reflects a larger one: Men are increasingly considered capable and effective single parents. "It appears that fathers raising children on their own are doing a better job than they were several decades ago," observes Doug Downey, Ph.D., a sociologist at Ohio State University. In fact, the care they provide is almost indistinguishable in its effect from that given by single mothers, as a recent study by Downey demonstrates: on measures of self-esteem, behavior and performance in school, relationships with others, and well-being later in life, children raised by single mothers and single fathers fared virtually the same.
There's a lesson here for fathers in intact familes: they only act like "Dad" because there's a "Mom" to play off of. "Faced with similar structural demands and without another adult with whom to 'do gender,'" notes Downey, "women and men in single-parent households act in less sex-stereotyped ways than their counterparts in mother-father households."
The Stepdad
Stepparents of both sexes are an increasingly familiar part of family life: more than 33% of U.S. children are expected to live in a stepfamily by age 18. While cultural fables abound about stepmothers, there are few featuring their male counterparts--but the social science research on them is straight out of the Brothers Grimm.
Stepfathers, it turns out, invest fewer resources in their charges, are less involved in their lives, and know less about their thoughts and opinions than biological fathers. Men find it more difficult to raise stepchildren than biological children, and become less satisfied with stepfathering once they have had children of their own. Grimmest of all, the work of Martin Daly, Ph.D, and Margo Wilson, Ph.D., both psychology professors at McMaster University in Ontario, indicates that men are much more likely--on the order of 100 times--to abuse and even kill their stepchildren than their genetic offspring.
Blame nature for this bleak reality, the researchers say: such behavior is in an evolutionary sense "adaptive." A father looks after the well-being of his child, the theory goes, to ensure that his own genes will be reproduced in turn. A man has no such genetic investment in his stepchildren, who may even take resources from his own children or time from his partner, their mother.
Despite the harsh implications of such theories, Daly insists that looked at from another angle, they offer an impressive demonstration of the strength of the father-child bond. "Parental love is the most selfless love we know. You give and give to your kid and get nothing back and you're glad to do it," he says. "It would be very strange if people acted that way toward just any old baby" The fact that the great majority of stepfathers are kind and loving toward their stepchildren is a testament to a bond of another sort: affection, freely chosen and generously given.
If there's any insight to be gleaned from this gathering of modern father figures, perhaps it's just that: what makes a father may be genetic material, or a monthly check, or a legal document, but what makes a dad is love.
BY ANY OTHER NAME...
Confronted with rapidly changing family forms, psychologists and others who work with families have had to reach for terms beyond the familiar mother, father, child, inventing a new vocabulary to describe family members' new roles. Here, a sampling:
o BINUCLEAR FAMILY As postdivorce fathers become more involved with child rearing, they are beginning to be seen as the other hub of family life, just as important as mothers.
o SOCIAL PARENT When two parents actively care for a child, but only one of them is genetically connected to the child--as is often the case in gay and lesbian couples-the parent who does not share the child's genes is known as the social parent.
o SERIAL PARENTING As divorce and remarriage have become common, men, and to a lesser extent women, are producing multiple sets of children with different partners.
o DISTANCE PARENTING The increasing mobility of Americans has taken many divorced parents far away from their children. Though no one argues it's ideal, parents who have no choice are learning how to parent from a distance.
o NONRESIDENTIAL FATHER Recent estimates suggest that almost 60% of children growing up in America will live apart from their biological fathers at some point. That makes the nonresidential father--one who doesn't live with his children--the norm rather than the exception.
o POST-DIVORCE FAMILY Once, we spoke of broken homes and split families in the wake of divorce. Now counselors, therapists and others are telling their clients that while divorce may end a marriage, it doesn't end a family. Mother, father, and children are all still there--just in a different configuration.