FAM:Home alone is no place for kids  by Cal Thomas

   The labor department reports that a growing number of professional
women are quitting their jobs and choosing a life at home with their
children over the pressures of trying to manage a career and
motherhood. According to government figures just released, the number
of working women, aged 25-34, declined last year for the first time in
more than 40 years. Ellen Galinsky of the families and Work Institute
who is an expert on women and work, told The Washington Post, "The
numbers are still small, but we are seeing more and more women saying
it's not worth trying to be both mothers and hold down full-time jobs."

   Not only is it not worth it to many women, it is also not worth it
to their young children. In a new book that is bound to be
controversial, psychologist Brenda hunter (who holds a doctorate from
Georgetown University) contends that America's children feel adrift and
homeless Hunter is especially concerned about children who enter day
care as infants, "those who - the research shows - feel rejected by
their mothers and sometimes by their fathers." She says their number is
increasing.

   In the book "Home by Choice: Facing the Effects of Mother's Absence"
(Multnomah), Hunter tells of her concern "about a culture that is at
war against mother love. For more than two decades we have made it
costly for women to elect to stay home to nurture their children, and
those who have chosen home have paid dearly both economically and in
terms of self-esteem."

   She indicts feminist leaders such as Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer
and Betty Friedan who, she says, are products of dysfunctional families
and who are rebelling against the poor nurturing she says they
experienced as children. Because of their own experiences, Hunter says,
they have led women to make wrong choices that have adversely affected
their lives as well as the lives of their children.

   "Betty Friedan," writes Hunter, "grew up in a household short on
mother love. According to Betty's sister, Amy, their mother, Marion,
had 'a complete inability to nurture...We really absolutely did not
have a mother loving us.'" Similar stories are told of Greer's and
Steinem's upbringings.

   Hunter contends that a child internalizes a sense of "home" or an
abiding sense of "homelessness" based on those earliest parental
attachments, and that the mother is central in this process. If a
mother is often absent or emotionally inaccessible, a child may suffer
profoundly.

   What comes through most strongly in this book is that women have
been lied to. By skillful manipulation, a generation of women has been
sold the lie that ultimate fulfillment is to be found in the workplace
and not, in cooperation with men, successfully rearing the next
generation.

   Instead of acknowledging the failure of a generation to produce the
"brave new world" they promised - in which women, men and their
children would be content - the radical feminist push on to offer more
of the same.

   Hunter urges working women of very young children to come home. She
believes women who make such a small sacrifice will live to rejoice
over their decision - and their children will, too.

   Cal Thomas writes a column syndicated by the Los Angeles Times

