Working moms: In many homes, the main breadwinner

In two out of five American homes, it’s mom who’s bringing home the bacon, said Kate Dries in Jezebel.com.A Pew Research Center study reveals that working mothers are now the primary breadwinners in a record 37 percent of households with children, up from 11 percent in 1960. Most of these primary breadwinners are single mothers, but 40 percent of the women in the survey are married and outearn their husbands—marking a sea change in our society’s gender roles and the economy itself. Still, Americans remain ambivalent about this ongoing transformation, said Philip Bump in TheAtlanticWire.com. Three-quarters tell Pew it’s harder for families with working moms to bring up children, and 51 percent still feel it’s “better” for the mother to stay home to look after the kids while dad earns the bucks. But with many families requiring two incomes to make ends meet, the country is quickly leaving the “Leave It to Beaver model” behind.

“Ladies, if you want to work that’s fine,” said Erick Erickson in RedState.com. But let’s not kid ourselves: The “ideal and optimal family arrangement” is the traditional nuclear family, with mom at home. Look at what science has revealed about the animal kingdom: The male protects and provides for his family, while the female “tames the male beast,” and nurtures the next generation. Ignoring what’s natural is bad for children, and is “killing our society.”

That’s a pretty narrow view of the natural world, said Will Wilkinson in Economist.com.“There is, in fact, a stupefying variety in the animal kingdom.” Male and female foxes team up to provide food for their offspring, for example, while female bonobos bond into groups and dominate the males. In hunter-gatherer human societies, women actually contribute more food to the clan, while men hunt mainly to display to one another—and to the women—how fierce and manly they really are. Perhaps this “habit of posturing” explains why threatened modern males like Erick Erickson feel such a need to pound their chests, bellow, and defend “the prerogatives of men.” It’s also nonsensical to insist that working moms are bad for kids, said Elspeth Reeve in TheAtlanticWire.com.An analysis of dozens of studies has found that children of working moms do no worse, academically or behaviorally, than those of stay-at-home moms, and are actually less likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. Meanwhile, the country’s crime rates and teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows, the divorce rate is declining, and the literacy rate is around 99 percent. “America is kind of awesome, actually, despite all these terrible working women.”

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It’s not awesome for everyone, said Jonathan Cohn in NewRepublic.com, especially not in families where the primary breadwinner is a single mother. Those moms are more likely to be black or Hispanic and very young, and they earn a miserable median income of $23,000 a year—less than half the mean income of a household with two working parents. Their kids are likely to grow up in poverty. In other words, there is “a sharp, discernible class divide” between working moms—and on the wrong side of it, there is mostly desperation and poverty. So let’s not put a pretty, egalitarian gloss on what is actually a troubling trend, said W. Bradford Wilcox in NationalReview.com. Yes, it’s a good thing that “bright and capable women” are being integrated into the American workforce. But the reason many women outearn their husbands is that the men have been unemployed for years, or are working low-paying, part-time jobs. Add that to the boom of single motherhood, and you have “the familial ingredients of an American dystopia, not an androgynous utopia.”

True—we’ve hardly arrived at “a happy new egalitarian paradise,” said Hanna Rosin in Slate.com. But it’s equally clear that the “old days aren’t coming back.” More women than men now are earning college degrees, while blue-collar men have seen their incomes steadily decline as jobs that involve hard, physical labor disappear. Those trends, like the rise in working mothers, are only going to continue. It’s time to stop arguing about whether or not women should be working and start looking for ways to improve the lives of everyone—the “displaced men, the overworked single mothers, the guilty high-earning mothers.”