Forced Labor: What's Wrong with Balancing Work and Family

by Brian C. Robertson

The last thing parents should do is try to “balance” work and family. A revolutionary shift of time and attention from home to the workplace has left the family on the ropes. Researcher Brian... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1890626325
• ISBN13: 9781890626327
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Spence Publishing Company
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

This book changes everything

I'm a 20 year-old highly motivated student at a prestigious university. My entire life I've worked diligently so I could have a successful career. However, after I began reading this book, my thinking has been turned on its head. Now I can see that I've been motivated by all the wrong things: ego, self-aggrandizement, money, and status. This book has helped me understand all that motherhood used to be and could be. It is not a banal existence; there are beautiful possibilites open to the imaginitive mind. Our country was founded on the Protestant ethic that the most noble thing one could do is to be selfless, to give everything you have to your children and your family. My words are like gravel in the mouth compared to Robertson's eloquence. I wish I could capture the beauty of his words here. Please, read this book. It changes everything.

Extremely informative

Robertson shows how the best care is maternal care and why society is in denial of this fact. I found this book very informative and enlightening, and has forever changed the way I look at alternative child care and the media, whose refusal to tell the truth about parenting is causing the millions of children to be neglected.

Time for a rethink

The West is struggling with the related issues of women in the workforce, childcare, maternity leave, and family breakdown. The usual wisdom is to say that we just need to try harder to balance work commitments with family responsibilities. But Brian Robertson, a writer living in Washington DC, believes the answers lie elsewhere.Indeed, from a historical perspective, the current crisis is really an anomaly. The modern feminist movement of the 60s taught that the only good woman is a career woman, and that homemaking and motherhood were to be despised and fled from. But interestingly, the women?s movement prior to that fought for the right of a mother to stay at home with her young children, and not be conscripted into the paid workplace.Thus the struggle for those in the earlier years of the women?s movement was to protect women from the encroachment of market forces, and to prevent them from being forced into career at the expense of their families. Motherhood and homemaking, in other words, were seen as honorable and valuable ends in themselves.But with the late 60s and onwards, the new wave of feminists took a totally different line: only in the paid workforce can a woman find meaning, freedom and dignity. Thus the vitriolic attack on mothers and the family. Betty Friedan therefore could call the home a "comfortable concentration camp" while Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown could label a mother and housewife as "a parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger ? a bum". A woman?s freedom, said these feminists, meant that a woman should and could be independent both in the economic and the reproductive realms. Women just do not need men, and are better off without them. Establishing a career and gaining financial independence is the first goal of the modern woman. And millions of Western women bought this line of thought.Of course now the inherent contradictions are coming all too clear. Women who were told that they could have it all are now fining that they have very little. They may have a good job, but they have no husband or boyfriend, no children and no family. And many today are deeply regretful of this fact.But it is not just women who have suffered at the hands of feminist orthodoxy. Children have been the big losers. Millions of children today are being raised by strangers. Yet all the social science research shows that children desperately need their mums and dads. No day care system can ever compete with the love and attention of a mother and a father.Yet as Robertson documents, while the social research on all this is quite clear, very few are willing to promote the findings, for fear of incurring the wrath of feminists and of making working mums feel guilty. So although the research is clear, that attachment is important for infants and mother-child bonding is crucial, millions of mothers are ignoring the evidence, and their maternal instincts, and are abandoning their children in droves.The harmful effects of extended perio

An excellent book by a clear and reasoned thinker

...This book is a wonderful distillation of Brian's views on the workplace, political and social movements and most interestingly his work here is a roadmap for the analytical process he undergoes to arrive at his conclusions. Brian's book is an outstanding example of constructive critical thinking...one feels envigorated, enlightened, and most importantly tested and forced to confront deeply held truths and defend those ideas within that are found lacking.It is a book to be proud of and I enjoyed it, unreservedly.Agree with him or not, give him a chance to make his case in this book which addresses the foundation of a polite society, family.

Help in Understanding Some Negative Trends

I believe that this book should be required reading for anyone who is concerned about the debilitating trends in our society: students shooting their classmates, breakdowns in family relationships, high divorce rates, and out-of-wedlock childbirths. The author presents significant evidence to show that these may all be symptomatic of adult America's obsession with work outside of the home, and subsequently leaving young America to try and invent its own culture and morality.Recent studies have shown that today's youth suffer from a far higher rate of mental illness than those who grew up just a couple of generations ago. Social disconnectedness and a sense of impending doom have driven many of our youth toward immediate gratification and away from a long-term interest in education and work. At the same time, technological change and the knowledge explosion makes a successful vocation even harder to attain. This is especially true among young men, whose participation rates in postsecondary education, in the electoral process, and in civic activities are at an all-time low and declining rapidly.Although Robertson's book is deep and well documented, it is very readable. He is at his best in the chapter where he discusses the contrast between the work of a full-time mother with that of a "career woman." Homemaking, which was considered the ideal by feminists as recently as the middle of the twentieth century, is now looked upon as demeaning and destructive of self-esteem, while a "career" outside of the home is viewed as something highly desirable and worthy of achievement. "The work of raising children requires constant hidden sacrifice, unacknowledged and unrewarded by society, often unacknowledged and unrewarded by one's own family-particularly the children themselves. ... A society that measures success exclusively in terms of material or professional attainment is unlikely to accord much status to the hidden work of the mother in the home."Especially upsetting to those who believe that the traditional family is the foundation of civil society is the palette of economic incentives that government and business offer to the mother who chooses to select "professional" childcare. Childcare credits, tax-exempt childcare flexible spending accounts, and higher IRA savings limits abound for the two-earner family, while the mother who elects to raise her own children receives no benefits in exchange for sacrificing a dual income and striving to make ends meet on a single income.Robertson offers criticism for Republicans and Democrats alike. Neither major political party has found a way to support the concept of the traditional family, despite their continual touting of "family values" and "family-friendly legislation" that further drives wedges between mothers and their children. Instead of discouraging divorce and/or out-of-wedlock childbearing, welfare policies have forced mothers to accept out-of-the-home childcare so that they can go to work full tim