The Hard-working Mother

Throughout past generations, the typical family structure was that of the nuclear style. A nuclear family consists of the mother and father and their children. The nuclear structure sets the father up to be the money making portion of the family while the mother is the caregiver of the family. As times have changed, women have started to make their way into the money making positions of the family as well. Even though women have started to take these positions, they haven't replaced the men in these positions; men have kept their positions as well. The problem that comes along with this is that the children don't have the "caregiver" in the family structure anymore. This creates a problem for women and not men because technically that is their assumed position to fill.

Mothers have to deal with one of the largest double standards once they have their children. Obviously their children need to be cared for, but their husband most likely has his full-time job and is unable to help. The mother has the two options of either staying home and taking care of the children herself, or continuing her job and putting the children through daycare or hiring a nanny. If the mother decides to stay home and take care of her children herself, she is judged for "taking the easy way out" or "using it as an excuse to be lazy." Lots of people don't realize that being a stay at home mom warrants itself as a full-time job as well. On the other hand, if the mother decides to go back to her job and hire a nanny or put her children through daycare, she isn't being a "nurturing mother" and her children are "being raised by a complete stranger." Also, daycare is super expensive, and a woman is basically paying for her children to be watched just so she can go and make money and then end up paying it a good amount of it back to the daycare. In Kimmel's article, "The 'Constructed Problems' of Contemporary Family Life," he talks about the issue of daycare. Kimmel says, "The 'problem' of daycare turns out to be a debate about whether or not women should be working outside the home...To ask whether or not women should work outside the home is, of course, to ask the wrong question. For one thing, it poses a class-based contradiction, since we encourage poor women to leave the home and go to work, and middle-class women to leave the workplace and return home." So class also comes into play when we judge whether or not a women should return to work or not. This problem could possibly be solved if we just eliminate the nuclear structure of family as our default structure, and realize that their are multiple varieties of families in today's world. Attached is an article by TIME that explains how there is no such thing as the typical family anymore.

http://time.com/3265733/nuclear-family-typical-society-parents-children-households-philip-cohen/