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Brenda Hunter: A Voice for Mother Love
| Article
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20502 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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5 / 1992 |
2,485 Words |
| Author
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J. Richard Pearcey
J. Richard Pearcey is a Life editor at The World & I. |
"You must be really bored. You must have heard this hundreds of times," said psychologist and author Brenda Hunter to the camerawoman during a break. "Yeah," came the reply. "But, you know the interesting thing? I've worked twenty years. My daughter is nineteen years old. I have never had time just to relax and enjoy her."
Brenda Hunter has specialized in studying the most intimate attachments between mother and child and has spoken at child-care conferences and national conventions and before congressional staff. Of late, she has appeared on radio and national television to discuss her views and her most recent book, Home by Choice. She always brings an empirical rudder with her, better to sail through the seas of psychobabble that swamp infotainment today.
Life editor J. Richard Pearcey recent talked with Hunter about her book, the development of her views, and, among other things, the most important thing a mother can do for her children.
THE WORLD & I: Your new book, Home by Choice, asserts that America has been "creating a cultural climate that wars against mother love." This and other statements like it seem to have caused quite a stir. What do you make of it all?
Brenda Hunter: For the past twenty-five years, the mother at home has been massively devalued by the culture. The eighties was the era of the superwoman, and it also was the time when the notion of quality time developed, was demythologized, and disappeared. You don't hear anybody talking about quality time now. What I'm hearing more and more is employed mothers talking about the reality of being too pushed, too pressured.
Instead of believing in quality time, we have developed what I call the myth of the infinitely resilient child. This child can enter day care at three weeks of age, experience a succession of care givers until he enters school, come home to an empty house during his school years, and then emerge at age eighteen with a strong core sense of self. Everything I know tells me this is not accurate. Children need an enormous amount of committed, on-line parental time. A legion of mothers know this and are choosing to stay home.
So, I wrote Home by Choice for the embattled mother at home as is indicated by the title of the book itself. Some members of the media would cast me as the enemy of the employed mother. This is more a matter of how the issue has
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