“You know what’s truly a scam? Paying someone else to raise your own children while you go to work to be able to pay for them to raise your children.” 

One Catholic mother posted this on Facebook only to be predictably and angrily chastised by another Catholic mother. Anything perceived as criticizing parenting is worse than if I walked into your living room and said: “Looks like you’ve gained weight and your house is a mess.” 

I don’t love the meme. But neither did I love the aggrieved mother’s response. Parsing the emotional dialogue may help bridge the gap between parents making different choices. 

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The meme is preaching to the converted who, in this case, are mothers feeling slighted for their choices. They feel this way because they are. Any mother at home full time today de facto gets less respect and certainly less attention, precisely because she doesn’t do waged work. 

When I am asked “what do you do?” I say I am a researcher at a think tank, even though this is how I spend 20 hours a week. The remaining 148 hours are spent on a category we’ll call “other,” but which largely amounts to being my daughter’s mom. Nonetheless, I do not say I am a mother. 

Nor do I say I am an aunt or a daughter. The cold, hard truth is that the unpaid relational and caregiving roles that make our communities a better place evoke little respect or even interest from “the world.”  

One mom I know felt duped by a second wave feminist culture in which family life was devalued. She was told to put a priority on her waged work and that daycare was a simple solution. That took a toll on her mental health. She may be surprised to learn that in this response she is not alone. 

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One major study of daycare in Quebec found “evidence of a detrimental impact of [Quebec’s daycare program] on parental health, most convincingly for mothers’ mental health, and on relationship satisfaction.” 

Today’s culture leans heavily in the direction of coaxing all women toward waged work whether or not they need to for financial reasons. Put simply, we are not marrying less and having vanishingly few children because motherhood is over-valued. Some family benefits such as generous maternity leave exist in no small part to ensure mothers of young children return to waged work. There is also an ongoing over-reaction to an era in which women were not encouraged to work outside the home at all. Economic growth thus partners with second wave feminist sentiment, carving out a rut where mothers who stay home are betraying the economy and female empowerment, too. 

All of this is a 180 degree turnaround in religious subcultures. 

There, we meet mothers who feel denigrated because they work outside the home either by choice or from need. Hagiographical descriptions of motherhood from the pulpit have been known to cause single women to leave church crying. It is in religious subcultures that we meet those who place having children on a pedestal so high that even those who have them cannot relate. 

Naturally, the implication that a parent has subcontracted out guiding their children into adulthood is insulting. At the same time, one aspect of the child care policy debate that has never been thoroughly addressed is quantity of time in care, not quality. How long your kids are in another’s care at a particular age is as important as the type of care if you ask psychologists Erica Komisar, Gordon Neufeld and Jay Belsky, among others. The public conversation has been skewed toward accepting a norm of non-parental care rather than unpacking how to do non-parental care well when it must be used. 

Barring major shifts in the economy and government policies that might allow me to toil side by side with my six-year-old (she did not take an active role in helping to craft this text), we can just acknowledge each side has pitfalls. There never was a mom who didn’t use some form of child care, and there certainly are also moms who diminish their own importance to their kids by overusing child care for non-economic reasons. 

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We can never know who falls into what camp—nor should we attempt to discern. On social media posts that offend, I’ll attempt to always choose shutting the computer off and instead spend the time with my kid that might otherwise be spent acting as a keyboard warrior. 

Andrea Mrozek is Senior Fellow with Cardus Family.