“Michelle Obama’s toned arms are debated,” fretted the headline in the Los Angeles Times last month. “How buff is too buff?” There followed a recap of the sleeveless official portrait dress brouhaha, a parenthetical suggestion that Madonna’s hours in the gym contributed to her divorce, and, the paper’s hometown being L.A. a quote from a plastic surgeon about the growing popularity of the brachioplasty, or arm-lift.
Can we really be worrying that the First Lady is too ripped? I am amazed, and relieved. We’re sniping about Michelle Obama being cut! We’re pathetic, of course, envious and threatened. But a working mother has gone and unapologetically moved her own mother into the White House and we’ve uttered nary a cross word about Obama’s mothering. We dubbed the woman First Granny and moved on.
Can it be that while Obama was wrapping those biceps around the Queen we quietly forgot to snipe at her childcare arrangements? Have we finally accepted the notion that raising children needs to be a communal effort? Did the so-called Mommy Wars just end with the proverbial whimper?
And most revolutionary: If we are giving up this destructive, endlessly circular debate, might we finally be ready to get on with the business of making sure that all kids have access to the best possible early childhood education, regardless of who’s providing it?
Me, personally, I’m going to write Obama asking that she make the creation of high-quality, universal childcare a national crusade. I’m going to wrap my letter to the First Lady around a copy of Penelope Leach’s brand-new book, Child Care Today: Getting it Right for Everyone. A British psychologist and author of Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five, Leach’s authority on the welfare of children is beyond reproach. It matters far, far less whether children are cared for by Mom, Grandma, a nanny or a preschool teacher than that we guarantee this care is attentive and consistent, she has declared.
“Looking regretfully over our shoulders at a rose-tinted past stops us from making realistic assessments of the present or looking forward to how we could make a better future, and both are urgent,” Leach writes. “The reality is that nonmaternal childcare is a fundamental part of modern societies; until we acknowledge that, we shall not recognize, let alone address, the unpalatable reality that much childcare, especially for children under three, is currently of dismally low quality…. Far more shameful is that we know how to improve the quality of childcare, and we are not doing it.”
And in this, Leach has harsh words for the United States. More than any other industrialized nation in the world, we expect parents (read: mothers) to sort this out on their own. We offer no paid parental leave and precious little flextime. A year of quality childcare costs more than a year’s tuition at our best public universities, yet we expect almost all families to shoulder the cost themselves. We profess concern about the achievement gap, about the cycle of violence and poverty, and about our foundering ability to compete in the global marketplace, yet we seem clueless to the long-term costs of our policies.
Minnesota has historically been home to some of the best early childhood education in the country and, until the start of the current decade, had a relatively good track record of supporting families that needed help paying for it.
And most of us need help: Minnesota has the highest rate of maternal workforce participation in the country. At the same time, childcare centers in the Twin Cities cost more than care anywhere else except Boston. We can expect to pay $300 a week for infant care. And we don’t want to pay less, not if we want our kids to have good care, provided by people with formal training who are minding few enough kids they can be properly attentive to each. For a long time we had this in Minnesota, it’s one big reason why Lake Wobegon’s children were above average. There’s plenty of political blame to be parceled out for the ruthless funding cuts of the last decade to early childhood education. One party is hostile to childcare; the other has been too afraid of its own shadow to fight for families.
Leach has said it, though, and even if no one in St. Paul is listening it appears the White House is now home to a working mother who’s capable of bench-pressing more than the entire House minority caucus. Let’s hope she can exert some muscle on the national policy scene in this regard. When she comes home, victorious, Sasha, Malia, and the First Grandma will be thrilled to see her.
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
