As if she had not suffered enough, a second heinous crime has been committed against Deborah Eappen, the mother of the 8-month-old baby that British au pair Louise Woodward has been convicted of killing.
Eappen reported in an interview with CBS-TV’s Bryant Gumbel Wednesday she had received many angry letters telling her that the death of little Matthew was her fault, that she should never have left her two sons alone with a “stranger.”
Similar comments have dominated talk radio programs.
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Besides telling us how sick in the head some people can be, such comments illustrate something particularly disturbing about the nation’s state of mind these days, particularly when it comes to working mothers.
Contrary to the emphasis in many media stories, this uproar over child care is not about au pairs. More children are killed by their parents each year than by au pairs, nannies, babysitters and child-care centers put together.
At least 2,000 children, the vast majority age 4 and younger, die every year of abuse and neglect, according to the Washington-based U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect. The panel found most abuse killings of children were caused by men–enraged fathers or step-fathers or by boyfriends of the mothers.
So why all the attention to outside child care? As a working mom, Matthew’s mother made one of the safer child-care choices available to her. Mrs. Eappen, wife of Sunil Eappen, an anesthesiologist, is an ophthalmologist who worked three days a week and went home during the day to breast feed her baby.
But that wasn’t enough for her critics. They essentially are telling her she should have quit work. By this rationale, a well-educated, professional woman is not to be as sympathetic a figure as a waitress or factory worker who presumably works to make ends meet.
But, even if Mrs. Eappen were a blue-collar mom, the world would not have left her alone. Somebody would be citing some study or other to “prove” that her children will be irreparably damaged by the absence of mommie at home all day, every day.
I might believe some of that criticism were it not for the odd schizophrenia displayed by so many of the critics. When mothers work outside the home, a lot of Americans will tell them to stay home. When mothers stay home, but then need public aid to feed their families, many of those same Americans will tell them to get off their lazy backsides and go to work outside the home.
In fact, times have changed and a lot of people haven’t caught up. When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, working moms were the exception. Sometime in the 1970s or so, working moms became the rule. This shift happened for a variety of reasons–partly because the mothers and their families needed the money, partly because our nation’s increasingly technological economy needed their skills and labor.
Unfortunately, child-care services and attitudes about it have yet to catch up. Some 13 million American children today spend all or some of their day in the care of someone other than a parent. The supply of child care is tight, the quality is spotty and the pay of child-care workers quite often barely meets the minimum wage.
A week before the Louise Woodward verdict came down, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton held a conference on child care at which the president promised to ask Congress for $300 million over five years to improve the pay and training of child-care workers. That’s a start, but only a start.
New regulations and tax incentives for parents are two other ideas worthy of serious consideration to deal with this growing dilemma faced by, but hardly limited to, the nation’s soccer moms.
As the backlash against Deborah Eappen tells us, the nation’s working moms have a Rodney Dangerfield problem–they don’t get enough respect.
The backlash against Matthew’s mother is firmly grounded in our national anguish and ambivalence, even at this late date, about working mothers.
Maybe the nation’s working moms should consider taking a day or two off.
A national strike by the nation’s millions of working mothers would shift the debate from whether mothers should work to an intriguing question: whether the nation can get along without their contributions in the workplace.
Imagine the seismic quake that the absence of working mothers would send through Wall Street.
Then maybe the question of quality child care would get a little more respect.
Then we can stop blaming victims for the problem.
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