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Greetings!
Take a look at what we have in this issue.
Don't forget to follow NAMC on Facebook, keep up with policy news at Your (Wo)Man in Washington, and take a look at our parenting blog, Mothers Central.
  
The mothers of MOTHERS.
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 DC Dispatch - Deficit Reduction: Economic Security on the Chopping Block
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All the oxygen is being sucked out of official Washington by the never-ending deficit reduction negotiations. Whether or not raising revenues is part of the solution, the Deficit Reduction Committee will be cutting federal programs to narrow the gap. This has got women's and family advocates meeting around the clock, as they attempt to protect the millions of working families whose economic security is already precarious. Right now, 45 million people in this country are living under the poverty line, currently pegged at $44,000 for a family of four. A whopping 40% of all children in the US live in these households. Wages in the past 30 years have been flat (except for the highest earners) in spite of rising productivity and economic growth. Expenses for housing, childcare, food, fuel and healthcare have kept going up. So working hard and playing by the rules is no longer any guarantee of financial stability, let alone of settling comfortably into the middle class. Read more here.
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Motherhood and Politics
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Did you become more or less liberal or conservative when you became a mother? Studies suggest parenthood can push you to the right on issues like legalizing marijuana, and/or push you to the left on child nutrition or health insurance policy. Motherhood can make your stake in the future emerge more distinctly, and - we hope - prompt you to speak out and speak up to your friends, families, and communities. This 21 minute radio discussion from WNYC will "speak" to you, in more ways than one.
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Up All Night |
 Motherhood can take a toll on a girl, alright. Turns out the waiting rooms of sleep clinics are filled mostly by women, who often start a lifetime of troubled nights when pregnant. Twice as many women, over 15 million, take prescription meds to get some shut-eye. What effect does this have on our quality of life? The New York Times attempts an answer. The article prompted many interesting responses from sleepy mothers. The most passionate was penned by maternal economics expert Joan Williams, accusing the Times of a "cutesy" treatment of a serious gender issue in her scathing HuffPo Opinion piece.
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Mother to Mother, or We're All On The Same Side |
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These two items are best read together, as they both discuss mothers' tendency to judge each other harshly, but judge themselves hardest of all. From the mothers who wrote Good Enough is the New Perfect, a chat about competitive mothering with a psychologist. And from an editor at www.babble.com, this shot at the alleged "mommy wars" between stay at home, work at home, and work outside the home moms: "No one choice is more "right" or honorable than the next. They're all flippin' hard and all worthy of recognition." Right on, sister! The full post is here. |
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Depreciating Women's Carework |
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We know as mothers that our culture and our country give family carework very short shrift indeed. Read this post about how federal policy leaves elder care provided by family members outside the minimal protections it offers. Everything economist Nancy Folbre says here applies equally to those, paid and unpaid, who care for children, their own or somebody else's. "Current and future family caregivers should favor better federal protections for paid home care workers out of respect for the value and dignity of caregiving itself." |
| MOTHERS Read and Review |
Click through to the MOTHERS Book Bag on GoodReads.com. Our resident bibliophile Kelly DiNorcia is branching out into maternal fiction and has posted her review of Making it up as I Go Along by Maria T. Lennon. |
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