Book Review: Parenting as Persons

How do people negotiate their transitions to parenthood? Do they simply step into a role similar to what they have seen in sitcom families, mothers nurturing the children within the home while fathers spend the day at the office and return home to put their feet up and read the newspaper? Perhaps some do -- and journalist Jeremy Adam Smith might say there's nothing wrong with that for families who choose it -- but for many families, these cultural images of gender and family are far from their lived experiences. Constructions of family such as those seen on television shape expectations, consciously or unconsciously, of what men, women, fathers, mothers, and families should be. Yet many American parents find that these expectations do not match the realities of their own lives.

Jeremy Adam Smith, in The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family, and Jane Satterfield, in Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond, explore the feelings and experiences of living outside these cultural constructions. Satterfield and Smith approach the topic quite differently: Satterfield, a poet, offers an introspective memoir of her entry into motherhood, and Smith, a journalist, combines interviews and sociological research with reflections on his own experiences as a stay-at-home father. Taken together, the books offer a compelling account of the ways in which cultural constructions constrain our experiences not only as women and men but as parents, and they explore how we might find greater freedom and fulfillment in these roles.

With essays whose language clearly shows that her primary home is in poetry, Satterfield communicates the multivalent and ambiguous state in which she finds herself as a mother, a woman, an intellectual, a writer, a teacher, a wife. Evoking a feeling and its opposite simultaneously, holding them in tension, she describes coming to terms with becoming pregnant in the midst of a stormy marriage during a year in her mother's native England. Daughters of EmpireEnlarge this imageHer new status was as a "piece of meat," a friend told her. "My body had become public property, an instant and often uninvited conversation opener, an endless source of advice and speculation -- preparation, I saw, for the total effacement of self by mothering," she writes. At the same time, Satterfield writes, employment as a teacher was no longer available to her because school administrators saw legally required paid maternity leave as too significant a liability. Even as she felt herself to be the same English-American poet that she had been before, becoming a mother had initiated an abrupt change in who and what she appeared to be. As she adapts to motherhood, on her own terms, she eventually also finds a more satisfying intellectual and emotional home with a new spouse and new employment in her field. Satterfield explores intimately the links between herself, her daughter, and her mother, at times separating them from one another to hold them up as individual persons, at other times regarding them in their relations to one another. In remembering a former teacher she had deeply admired, Satterfield observes that we arrive at greater comfort through trial and error as we navigate through the constraints of gender and family roles.

Jeremy Adam Smith also discusses the multivalent and ambiguous state of parenthood, using interviews, memoir, and sociological research to describe and explain the cultural and economic constraints on contemporary American families. The Daddy ShiftEnlarge this imageSmith argues that outdated cultural constructions of fatherhood and motherhood flatten the realities of parents' lives, their complex emotions and desires about caring for their children and finding personal and professional fulfillment as well. For example, he writes, "'She worked for me,' said my grandfather of his wife. 'I always said, "You work for me." She took care of the kids, and I took care of the money; I brought it home, so she would have enough.' When I asked him if he faced any challenges in raising the kids, he replied: 'I never did. My wife took care of all that. She brought the kids up.'" Smith argues that while the father-as-breadwinner ideal no longer holds, there is no clear consensus on what should replace it. He intends to raise awareness of the experiences of stay-at-home fathers and breadwinning mothers in order to expand our ideas of what family arrangements are possible.

To that end, Smith tells the stories of a number stay-at-home dads and refutes what he calls myths, such as that fathers only care for children if they are unable to find work outside the home. By addressing these myths, he points out the constructions of masculinity and fatherhood that underlie them, such as his grandfather's sense that fathers should primarily be breadwinners. But many of the stories that Smith tells are of men whose wives or partners have greater economic and professional opportunities than they do. In most cases, Smith says, the couples decided that they wanted to care for their children rather than having the children in daycare, and this meant that the men needed to be the ones to care for their children. As they lived out this decision, the couples came to find real value and depth in their experiences.

Daughters of Empire and The Daddy Shift are valuable for their attention to the depth and breadth of parents' experiences, and for their normative implications. Smith hopes to expand our constructions of fatherhood and masculinity to allow room for people to choose different narratives depending on what is appropriate for their lives. Satterfield, in describing and calling attention to her experience, provides opportunity for readers to reflect on their own experiences and the ways in which it is shaped by cultural constraints. Both of them contribute to a less reified, more flexible understanding of parenting and personhood.