By Marylou Kelly Streznewski

Lin is a 35-year-old stay-at-home mother who gave up her career as a geologist to raise her two sons, ages 3 and 9. She is sometimes overwhelmed by the demands of childcare and worries about lack of intellectual stimulation, and resuming her career. She believes that she is doing right by her children.

Ramona is a 36-year-old mother who has continued her career as a corporate attorney through the births of two children. She is sometimes overwhelmed by the demands of childcare, but she has the stimulation, and the income of her career. She worries about the effect of early day care on her two daughters, 1 and 3.

Whether her path that of resembles Lin or Ramona, contemporary life is a challenge to the emotional, physical and financial well being of a gifted woman who chooses to become a mother.

Is there a “best” way for gifted women to navigate this significant life phase?  Obviously not; each woman will choose her own path. However, there are aspects of our society which actually work against the nurturing of bright children by bright women, areas where we lag behind other developed countries.

As far back as 1985, Jacquelynn Eccles of the University of Michigan warned that we must not simply settle for advocating more career opportunities for gifted women; we must become advocates for honoring motherhood as a profession worthy of the time and talent of smart women.

In 1996, Jane Waldfogel of Columbia’s School of Social Work wrote, “Women’s equality is not about equal access to education or equal job opportunities any more – those things are done. The part that’s left is the part that has to do with family responsibilities.”

In American society we are advised to tell our gifted daughters, “You can be anything you want.” As her twenties and then her thirties tick away, and the career she worked so hard for is advancing, a woman may decide that yes, she wants to be a mother.

Comes the birth, and her deepest (healthy and truly feminine) instincts for nurture and connection wash through her life on a wave of hormones. “Who knew?” she marvels.

She wants to remain intimately connected to this growing life, and contrary to what the older research once told us, her sense of orientation to, and caring for others is not symptomatic of  inadequate ego development. (1993)

But her feminist conditioning says, “Get back to work. You can’t be just a housewife!” Reading the child development books, this gifted mother finds that they recommend that, even if excellent, full time child care be postponed until at least a year.

However, her bank account says that she can’t afford to stay home, and part time work may stunt her career and will deprive her and her children of essential benefits.

Given the divorce rate, having children is a risky business, whether you are a gifted person or not.

The reality which faces a gifted woman who chooses motherhood, is that our society does not support a female life-model based on time for nurturing children, and many other countries do. 

Here is how an economist (1988)described a woman at home, raising tomorrow’s leaders: “As a woman does not work during certain periods of time, less working experience is accumulated. [Moreover] during periods of non-participation, the human capital stock suffers from additional deterioration due to lack of maintenance.”

Woman as piece of machinery?

Here is how Theresa, an interviewee for my book, Gifted Grownups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential(1999) describes six years away from her practice as a pediatrician. “I stayed at home with my daughters because that nurturing is more important than twenty years of medical practice. I am raising the future mothers of America and that will outlast me for many generations.

"An amazing bonus of being home was that I actually had time to read all the journals. I am more informed on current practices than the doctors who have been working all along, and I have had time to revisit, and revise, some of my thoughts about pediatrics.” 

So much for rusting machinery.

Mother Nature has decreed that  the healthiest children are born to women in their twenties. The male patterns of corporate society push gifted women into their thirties and even forties to have children, a long term disadvantage in women’s and children’s health, and not insignificantly, in health care costs.

But increasingly, according to Anne Crittenden,(2001) in her new book, The Price of Motherhood, Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued, talented women are not willing to wait to have children until they “almost qualify for the AARP.”

Crittenden says, “One of the worst kept secrets of the past two decades is the quiet exodus of highly trained women from corporations and leading professional firms.”

A female brain drain? Where are they going? Home. What are they doing? Raising children. Will these feisty confident women make it back into their professions?

Yes, but often not in the high positions they had; because unlike the rest of the developed world, our society has not yet awakened to the need to support our brightest mothers as they raise their gifted children.

When she returns to work, many employers will make it perfectly clear that she couldn’t possibly be that talented if she has been “just a housewife,” and she may be shunted off  into a “Mommy Track” which will permanently marginalize her career.

The potential  CEO may settle for middle management . The possible agency director will be a department head. The major scientific mind decides to opt for a minor research role. The gifted politician only runs for local office.

The result: the very real possibility that in positions of power in government, law, science, economics, education - positions where more humane social policy could be framed, the voices of those with real-world experience with children will not be heard.

In researching this article, the most haunting statistic I found was that in Sweden, where almost half of the legislators are women, there is no measurable child poverty.

Crittenden’s book documents how far behind we are in our support for bright women. "The United States has one of the lowest labor force participation rates for college-educated women in the developed world. Only Turkey, Ireland, Switzerland and the Netherlands are lower."

On maternity leave: “This country is one of only six nations in the world that do not require some form of paid maternity leave. The others are Australia, New Zealand, Lesotho, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea.”

The (mostly European) countries which match us as productive, forward-looking societies, have a greater percentage of their educated women who work at careers, and greater numbers of working women who choose to be mothers.

These women have the legal right to adjust to their working lives in various ways to suit the needs of their families. France: six months paid maternity leave, subsidized child care, a 35 hour work week.

The Netherlands: full benefits for part time work. Sweden: One year leave at 75% salary, and the right to an 80% schedule until your child is 8 years old. Great Britain: stipend to mother for each child.

Rather than lack of opportunity, this is the barrier against which our gifted mothers are struggling: America’s workaholic culture does not provide either social or financial support for a woman who asserts her right to combine motherhood with meaningful work.

A wide variety of educators, psychologists, sociologist and even economists have been calling for a restructuring of the workplace to make room for the less-than-linear life path which women bring, along with their skills, into the economic realm.

The two accomplished authors of  Answers to the Mommy Track (1993) have put it quite bluntly, “If we want educated and well trained women to have children in this society, then we must support the needs of these women and their husbands to take care of training, educating and developing these children.”

We who are advocates for the gifted will no doubt agree that, in this respect, our nation needs to catch up with the rest of the world.

References:

Crittenden, A. (2001) The price of motherhood: why the most important job in the world is still the least valued. (pp.4,16,28,88,95). New York: Henry Holt & Company.

Eccles, J. (1985). Why doesn’t Jane run? Sex differences in educational and occupational patterns, in The gifted and talented: developmental perspectives (p.240). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Ferguson,T. and Dunphy, J. (1993) Answers to the mommy track. (p.218). Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon Press.

Silverman, L. and Conarton, S. (1993). Giftedness and the development of the feminine, in Advanced Development, 5, p.45.

Streznewski, M.K. (1999). Gifted grownups: the mixed blessings of extraordinary potential. (p.54). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

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Article previously unpublished - posted here with kind permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marylou Kelly Streznewski received her M. Ed. from the College of New Jersey in Trenton. Certified as a program specialist in gifted education, she taught gifted teenagers for twenty-four years at Central Bucks East High School in Bucks County Pennsylvania.

The author’s perspective on gifted adults has been informed by a lifetime as a member of a three-generation extended family of smart kids and gifted grownups. A long-standing marriage to a gifted gentlemen and the raising of her own four gifted children has provided experience in the realities of life in a gifted family. As an educator, she has counseled gifted students and their families in a variety of settings.

In addition to her work as an educator, Ms Streznewski’s career has included theater, journalism, fiction and poetry; she has taught writing at high school and college levels. In addition to Gifted Grownups, her fiction and poetry have appeared nationally. Currently, she is associated with The Writers Room, a non-profit writer’s center in Bucks County, where she serves as a poetry curator, and the poetry editor of the Bucks County Writer, a literary quarterly. She is at work on a poetry manuscript and her second novel.

She is author of the book Gifted Grownups: the Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential

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