The recent internet sensation of BBC Dad—a historian who was interrupted during a Skype interview by his two children and responded with amusing awkwardness—has inspired a lot of discussion, mocking, and, of course, parody videos. My favorite of these last is BBC Mom, in which a mother in a similar situation calmly tends to the needs of both children, finishes cooking dinner, and does some household chores, all without once losing the thread of her remarks.
I laughed when I watched it. (I laughed, too, at the men’s rights advocates who shrieked in the comments about how it promoted misandry. What else can you do with MRAs?) But it got me thinking, again, about the multitasking mother stereotype that runs deeply through our images and discourse about parenthood.
In responding to criticism about how his attachment parenting philosophy is at odds with women’s participation in the public sphere, Dr. Sears confidently responds that women can practice attachment parenting while holding down a job as well because “Women are the greatest multitaskers in the world.” Indeed, a google image search for “working mother" turns up an awful lot of images like these:
Source: http://blogs.rj.org/
(I’ve written before, recall, about how attachment parenting does have roots in Christian fundamentalism and restrictive gender roles, and about how our thinking about women having it all is utterly backwards.)
It strikes me that so much of our burdensome and harmful culture around parenting in the States—the lack of adequate parental leave and affordable childcare, the pressure toward intensive mothering and unrealistic standards for women, the unequal distribution of domestic labor, the high rates of depression and unhappiness among parents—all rest on the notion that women not only can do several jobs at once but inevitably will do so. We believe that a mother is automatically and naturally a multitasker, that once she has a child she will never again devote herself fully to any pursuit other than mothering.
This has, I believe, profound consequences. Some of these are economic. One of the major reasons for the gender pay gap is that women tend to work fewer hours and choose careers that offer flexible work schedules—the so-called “mommy track.” In addition to affecting individual women’s lives, this shapes the working world in general, yielding fewer women in positions of power and thus compounding the effects of gender bias.
But this need not be so. What if childcare centers were affordable and lived up to the standards of the 1940s? What if domestic labor—physical and mental—were compensated, socially valued, and equitably distributed? What if women raising children were not expected to do at least two full-time jobs?
Casting the mother as a natural multitasker takes a social problem—the lack of adequate services to promote children’s well-being, which leads to unrealistic and burdensome demands on mothers—and presents it as an innate characteristic of women.
The image of the multitasking mother has profound consequences, too, for women’s intellectual, professional, political, and social lives. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively (and TED-talked) about the phenomenon of flow, a concentrated mental state that facilitates excellent, fulfilling work.
BBC Mom may be excelling at two or three jobs simultaneously, but she does not achieve flow. She can never attain that state of blissful absorption.
If women did not have to multitask, what could we achieve?