Are Moms Happier Outside the U.S.?
Journalist Abigail Leonard studied life for mothers in four countries. Here's what she found.
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Mother’s Day: A day of massages, pedicures, new, cozy pajamas (ideally bamboo!), and a brunch that you didn’t make. Some flowers!
It’s really nice to have a day — one day! — like that.
Or maybe….another world is possible. A world where mothers wake up every day to flexible paid leave, safe and affordable childcare, and a doctor who actually knows your name. (Plus all the other stuff, I’ll take that too).
Who among us hasn’t fantasized about the free childcare and year(s) long family leave dreamscape of Scandinavia, where you can hygge it up with your newborn eating cardamom buns? But is it really that different momming overseas?
Ahead of Mother’s Day this year, I was excited to chat with the journalist Abigail Leonard, whose new book, “Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries, follows the experience of four new moms in Japan, Kenya, Finland and the U.S.
Leonard guides us through the key moments of early motherhood for these four woman – from the first contractions to the pressures of pumping to drop off with new caregivers.
And yes, it is that different. The U.S. does not look good. Compared to what Leonard saw in Finland and Japan, for example, the differences were stark.
Returning to the U.S. after living in Japan, she writes, “When you came back after so many years abroad, you could see the negative space where those programs should have been, and the suffering their absence caused.”
I hope this conversation inspires you to see that other worlds – and systems – are possible. (I’ve edited our conversation for length and clarity.)
What did you learn, looking at these other places, that mothers in the U.S. could benefit from in terms of support for parents?
Well, I structured the book in three parts: looking at maternal health care, paid leave, and child care.
I think those are the three big levers that policymakers have in order to change the daily experience of motherhood. And it was really stark and striking how much of a difference having paid leave made in the daily lives of the women I profiled.
So the woman in the U.S. and the woman in Kenya both got three months, and that's pretty generous here in the U.S.
But the American woman's leave was not fully paid. The woman in Kenya's leave was fully paid because it's nationally guaranteed.
But for both of them, it felt like it was too short, and they were pretty stressed out and anxious, particularly as the time approached when they were going to go back to work. Then the transition to work was really hard for both of them, balancing motherhood at home and the requirements of their job. And they were both pumping, which the women with longer paid leave never did, because they never had to leave their babies.
I mean, pumping is a tool of capitalism to get women back to work so you can just keep feeding your baby and doing your work.
All of it was just so stressful.
The woman in Kenya ultimately found it so hard that she ended up getting fired because she was leaving to take care of her baby. The balance was basically impossible for her.
But early motherhood is not easy for anyone.
Universally, it's a difficult experience. But for the women in Japan and Finland, there was an ease with which they approached that part of it. They had longer to spend with their baby and adjust to becoming moms.
I really got the sense from the woman in Finland that she felt like she had control over the experience in a way that the others didn't, because there was so much flexibility. She could have agency in her motherhood, in the way that the others were being buffeted from one thing to the next.
You write that pronatal policies are not necessarily pro-woman policies. In Finland, those policies that might be considered pronatal did actually give her agency, and a sense of control. So what's the difference between something that's pronatal, but not pro-woman?
It was this interesting combination of policy and culture.
Finland has a more egalitarian culture around gender roles and parenting. In Japan, there's this idea that men should work. They work really long and grueling hours. And women historically have been professional housewives, essentially.
But now that's no longer economically feasible, more women are working, and so they're balancing both, but they still do something like seven times more of the work at home. So even though they have all these really generous social policies, there's a culture that exists that's making it impossible still to have the parenthood that I think a lot of the women there want.
An interesting thing is happening in Japan: more dads want to have time with their kids. So the government has actually responded by asking companies to publish the percentage of men that take paternity leave, as a way to shame companies into doing better. It's actually working. The rates are going up.
So culture and policy have to work together.
But in terms of pronatal versus pro-woman, I think an idea of centering the mother is key, and also providing a lot of flexibility in some of these systems. The flexible return to work is huge.
I'm wondering how you're thinking about the pro-natalist policies that are being floated by the current U.S. administration, like the idea of giving mothers a $5,000 baby bonus, given what you know about those policies and the history of this country?
Well, the $5,000 one was particularly interesting, because when I was in Japan, they had a similar policy, and so I was actually the recipient of that.
At the time, I was like, “Oh, this is great.” I was happy to get it, but it certainly didn't change my thinking about whether or not to have more children. There was no way that $5,000, and even the cost of my birth being covered and all these other financial incentives are going to change the calculation long term. It’s a much bigger thing than that.
So to me it just seems like, here we go again with this same kind of stuff put forward by the same segment of society, which is older men in power.
The push to get people who don't want to have kids to have them – it's gross, but also ineffective.
There are surveys that show that there are some American families that would have more children – maybe three rather than two, or two rather than one – if it was more financially feasible, and particularly around the cost of childcare.
So this idea that you should attack people who don't want to have kids, it's so misguided, because there are actually families in this country that do want to have more children and aren't having as many as they would like.
If the idea is to be pronatal and have more kids, well, what we're doing is not working, and what's being proposed is not going to fix it.
And the things that would fix it: maternal healthcare, paid leave, paid childcare, those are the things that just keep getting batted away here.
We had a universal childcare system during World War Two, and afterwards, there were actually protests in the streets, where parents came out to try to keep it because the government said they were going to shut it down after the war. Parents were outraged. They really were depending on this child care.
Part of the reason that they couldn't come up with a solution to the issue of childcare was that some of the Southern states wanted segregated daycares. So our own racism, in addition to the sexism, shot us in the foot there.
And then it came up again with Nixon, who championed the idea of universal child care while he was running for president, and was going to sign this bill in support of it. Then, at the last minute, churches mounted a letter-writing campaign against it. All these pundits came out and said it was a plan to Sovietize the youth. So then he vetoed the bill and said it was a radical piece of legislation. And it took the air out of the childcare movement.
So what we have now is private-equity backed childcare chains that no one can afford.
I was really surprised to see how much the system in Kenya looked a lot like the systems in the United States, in terms of the lack of support. The way in which economic insecurity made women have to go back into the workplace early.
So what kinds of other parallels did you see between the U.S. and Kenya?
I think partly there's a breakdown of the traditional systems, with modern, corporate-based systems replacing them. That's happening in Kenya, and to some extent, happening here. The woman in the U.S. had left her church community in the same way that the woman in Kenya was cut off from her ethnic community, so she didn't have the same kind of community support.
They were both left with depending on their workplace for benefits.
And I think it's important to remember that what happens here does, to some extent, get exported elsewhere. Even their health care system - it's this combination of public and private, and the insurance is employer-based and a lot of that's based on the U.S. system.
But you also draw out how much female activism there has been in Kenya for maternal health, for paid leave, for childcare. You have an amazing scene where this Member of Parliament rushes into the legislature with her baby, and that forces the government to build the daycare center they’d said they were going to build, but had been dragging their feet on.
Yes, and the reason they have paid leave is because there was a woman in the 1970s who was the only female parliamentarian who fought for it, and it eventually became law.
Since then, there have been a lot of female legislators that are paying attention to issues around workplace protections for mothers. And also there’s an active NGO presence there that, I think, does a lot around women's rights.
So they’ve been pretty successful around a lot of things.
Especially when you contrast it with the U.S. We've been trying to get both paid leave and paid childcare. And it just keeps getting stymied by the same forces of racism and sexism and corporate interests. It will come up again and again. Female activists will lead on this, and it doesn't go anywhere.
Kenyan activists have actually been a lot more successful in this area than women here have been able to be.
When I was reading the experience of the woman in Finland, and her “baby box” full of supplies provided by the state, and her longer paid leave, I just was so full of jealousy.
I thought it was so interesting what happens when she separates from her partner. When they're together but unmarried, they're treated as married. When they break up, as a single person, she also gets child support. So it just goes back to your point about how these systems create agency and possibility for women to continue to live their lives – married or unmarried. Would you characterize it as rosy as it seems to me on this side of the ocean?
Her story does speak to this idea about having agency and parenthood. Her relationship totally crumbles. It's very acrimonious. But she doesn't feel like she needs to stay in the relationship for any financial reasons. There's such a strong public system and a strong public safety net, and so it really allows her to navigate that relationship and parenthood exactly as she wants to.
But I don't think Finland is perfect. It's not as economically vibrant. You know, there's a lot of reasons why living there is not as good as some people's lives in the United States.
But the U.S. has a lot more disparity in terms of income inequality and the inequality of benefits, right? Some people live here like they're in Finland. They work for tech companies, and they have six months paid leave.
I often think we should focus on bringing this to the level of the state, and state legislatures could become like their own little Finlands.
I mean, that is what is effectively happening: All this stuff is happening at the state level, whether it's paid leave or childcare programs.
Sometimes I think we tell ourselves it's impossible, and I don't know if that's true. It just hasn't been a priority.
I also think there are a lot of stories we tell ourselves, like maybe taking long leave will hurt women's careers. But there's actual research that shows that six months is not going to set you back, and might even help, because you stay in the workforce.
I think we justify a lot of it and what we should be doing is organizing around it.
I spoke with a Congressman who made this point to me: It's really not good for our democracy if there's such different things going on in the different states. If some people have really generous benefits and some people don't, we lose even more of a sense of cohesion as a country.
So it is important to have national policies, and not just state-by-state, if only for preservation of democracy.
Yeah, I think about that a lot, especially in terms of abortion access, where that disparity is so huge state by state.
Is there anything else you’d like to say about the book, or that you wish I had asked you about?
I think it's really important to remember that motherhood can't be disentangled from politics and policy.
It's inherently political, because your experience of motherhood is going to differ based on where you have a baby. So you're involved whether you like it or not.
A lot of the things that we think of as being personal responsibilities and maybe even personal failures, as far as how hard motherhood is – they're really just because we exist in a bigger system.
I found that to be helpful to remember: It's not my fault. There are things being asked of me that shouldn't be. It's not only child care. It's also gun violence and safety issues. You're supposed to keep your own child safe in a society that seems not to value children's safety. You know, doing your own research and figuring out if the food supply is safe. These are basic things that a functioning society would do to guarantee the safety of its children.
So I think the answer is organizing. We need to recognize that there's a real inequality in this country. Some people already have some of these protections and benefits, and those people still need to advocate for them, because it needs to be a unified movement.
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“She has agency in motherhood” this says it all 🙌
Great interview-- I can't wait to read this book!