You're totally right, Chavi, that the grandmother solution is a band-aid solution, not a social change solution. It's also one, I believe, that will become decreasingly viable as more women have meaningful careers and are not available to take on childcare for their children's children. As much as my mother was desperate to be a grandmother (and believe me, she made that desperation abundantly clear on a near-daily basis until I had kids), she was equally clear that she was not about to retire from her very successful career as a college professor so that she could become my nanny. And why should she?
It is wonderful when we can rely on extended kin (or friend) networks to support us through the challenging childbearing years, but it is a major failure of modern American society that this is one of the only support networks available to families. It is astounding to me -- and frustrating, infuriating, etc -- that every family I know is scrambling to figure out their own individual solution to the very same work/family struggles. It's like each of us has to reinvent the wheel, and so it feels like we're all riding along in very wobbly carts (not sure that this analogy works, but hopefully you get my drift).
Organizations like MomsRising are doing the work to make change on a policy level. There's a social change movement to make the changes in our own families, too -- it's called feminism -- but I'll be the first to admit that putting those egalitarian ideals into practice is much harder than I thought it would be before I had kids.
You're totally right, Chavi, that the grandmother solution is a band-aid solution, not a social change solution. It's also one, I believe, that will become decreasingly viable as more women have meaningful careers and are not available to take on childcare for their children's children. As much as my mother was desperate to be a grandmother (and believe me, she made that desperation abundantly clear on a near-daily basis until I had kids), she was equally clear that she was not about to retire from her very successful career as a college professor so that she could become my nanny. And why should she?
It is wonderful when we can rely on extended kin (or friend) networks to support us through the challenging childbearing years, but it is a major failure of modern American society that this is one of the only support networks available to families. It is astounding to me -- and frustrating, infuriating, etc -- that every family I know is scrambling to figure out their own individual solution to the very same work/family struggles. It's like each of us has to reinvent the wheel, and so it feels like we're all riding along in very wobbly carts (not sure that this analogy works, but hopefully you get my drift).
Organizations like MomsRising are doing the work to make change on a policy level. There's a social change movement to make the changes in our own families, too -- it's called feminism -- but I'll be the first to admit that putting those egalitarian ideals into practice is much harder than I thought it would be before I had kids.