All breadwinner mothers — all working parents — would benefit from ending our societal assumption that children have a parent available at home, but to have a single conversation about whether "women working for pay makes it harder for parents to raise children" assumes choices that many women don't have.
The father is the breadwinner; the mother, the guardian of the home.
Her character, Kathy Jardine, is a psychiatrist and her family's breadwinner, the mother of an artistically inclined 12-year-old boy and the wife of a struggling-actor husband.
Those realities are even more crushing for the women who make up the majority of the new female breadwinners: single mothers and, especially, never married single mothers.
Re "When the Foster Care System Forgets Fathers" (front page, May 4): Although perceptions are shifting, the roles of fathers as breadwinners and mothers as caregivers still predominate.
But Slaughter makes what is probably the more important point, which is that in a world where women are expected to be breadwinners and mothers both, our social and professional expectations of what a typical career trajectory looks like need to become more friendly to the biological realities of motherhood.
MB: Society still views dads as primarily breadwinners, and mothers as the "social directors" of the family.
Because of the women's movement's push for women to engage in traditionally masculine pursuits in society, as women choose to sacrifice their child-bearing years to establish their careers, and as fathers feel increasing pressure to be involved with tending to children, the traditional roles of fathers as the "breadwinners" and mothers as the "caretakers" have come into question.
Very often, the benefits are calculated on the income of a single breadwinner – usually a mother.
Bill had a wife and four kids, and Khalid was the breadwinner for his mother and four sisters.
