Ancient ideals can be reforged and remembered and reappropriated to match the new times and new challenges of today. The family can be bonded by more than mere sentiment and consumption, but by meaningful mission and output. 

I wondered if the editors at The New York Times realized the irony in the title “The Pandemic Created a Child-Care Crisis. Mothers Bore the Burden.” Working mothers, who once bore their children in the womb, were forced by the pandemic to now bear what was called the burden of their children’s care.

In response to this “child-care crisis,” the author writes, mothers “became the default solution.” Forced from work back into the home, “forgotten and shunted to the sidelines,” these women waited for their kids to get vaccinated before returning them to daycares and schools. The milestone reached in January 2019—when women outnumbered men in the workforce for the first time in American history—crumbled before the triumph could be fully enjoyed: Men, once again, hold the majority. Only 56 percent of women are working for pay—the lowest since the mid-eighties.

At stake for these working mothers, the author claims, is not simply a paycheck, but self-determination, self-reliance, and the survival of their complex selves. As this childcare crisis lingered over weeks and months, “the shock turned to despair at the drudgery of the days, the loss of their professional purpose, the lack of choice in it all.”

Some of the women interviewed for the article expressed sentiments like, “I love everything about motherhood, and yet it doesn’t feel fair that I should have to sacrifice my career.” Others asked, “We think we’ve progressed so much, and then this pandemic happens and we all just revert back to these traditional behaviors…And this is a good moment to reflect, why do we do that?”

Have we arrived at the bottom when the Times sees nothing amiss in including the example of a mother who walks dogs professionally, wanting out of full-time mothering in preference to being “out and dirty with animals”? Rather outside with dogs than inside with her kids.

Much is amiss in our society and our families, as the article displays without realizing it. But instead of criticizing the disagreeable, I would actually like to defend these women and some of their sense of misfortune. The loss is greater than they suppose, and it includes us all, for it includes the household.

Productive Women

Have you ever considered how industrious and productive the Proverbs 31 woman is—how much work she has accomplished? Over the course of a lifetime, this woman not only has raised admiring children in the instruction of the Lord, but has:

• sought wool and flax, and worked with willing hands;
• brought her family food from afar;
• considered fields and bought them;
• planted a vineyard;
• dressed herself in strength;
• considered her merchandise with regard to profit;
• labored throughout the night;
• made bed coverings and clothes for winter;
• sold homemade garments and linens;
• contributed to the needs of the poor;
• labored such that her husband was respected in public; and
• not bowed to idleness or inactivity.

Was she a stay-at-home mother or a working woman? Yes.

Her duties toward the people of her home required production for her home. She was not forced to choose between them. Her ideal was to love her husband and children and to contribute her gifts and ingenuity to the production of the household. She did not replace Dad as primary worker, but she did work alongside him, in different ways in different seasons, to help build and manage their realm.

When we read of women who express a distaste for confinement to the realm of the household, thinking of it as a sort of dungeon, we can hear in their complaint a groan that the household is not what it is supposed to be. The productivity, the ingenuity, the purposefulness—for mother and all members involved—no longer exists as it once did within the household. The modern home, in many respects, is hollow. Though filled with more goods than ever, it has been emptied of purpose.

Place to Eat, Sleep, and Watch

The modern family can be described, simplistically, in terms of the household after the Industrial Revolution. During the mechanization and technological advancement of the world, work left the home—and men with it. This transition dealt a severe blow to the household as containing family business, as a productive realm. C.R. Wiley writes:

We don’t think of our households as centers of productive work. That’s because the economy has largely moved out of the house. During the industrial revolution steady work in factories replaced the home economy, and many people were forced to leave home to make a living. In the process the household was reduced to what we think of today—a haven in a heartless world—a place to sleep and eat and maybe watch television. (Man of the House, 31)

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