The Montessori educational philosophy presents an enlightening vision of who the child is and what he needs. From this perspective, the child’s focus is his work. Learning self-mastery and acquiring the skills necessary to engage with the world around him is a serious endeavor. It makes sense, then, to call what the child does in the world “work.”
The insights of Maria Montessori captured in the educational approach that bears her name seem astonishing and novel to many of us. The mantra of post-modern childhood is “just have fun.” Whatever children are attempting, wherever they are going, our culture coaches us to chant reassuringly, “Just have fun!” Adults will often justify overbearing coddling and license with a shrug of the shoulder and claim that “as long as they’re having fun, that’s all that matters!”
The contrast between these two paradigms is pronounced. In one, the child is an object to be entertained by the grown-ups who possess him. In the other, he is an actor, actively engaged in his development and experience of reality. The realms of productivity, i.e. moneymaking, are forbidden arenas to the child through whom workaholics live vicariously. Every day is cause for blue raspberry popsicles and new clothes and loads of television. It’s all attempting to be so celebratory! But if childhood is nothing but an extended vacation in which fun is the primary and only concern, children may come into adulthood with a crippling insecurity about their ability to do anything.
The mothers who choose to exit the official “working world” to raise their own children can become ensnared in the same vacation mindset. Mothers, who are convinced that by mere biology of childrearing that they are the most sacrificial and loving of all people, can struggle to realize that they are allegedly on the vacation, too. How does one align unending, constant sacrifice and endless, ceaseless fun? Every day is “survival mode,” which justifies every form of indulgence, excuse, and slovenliness. Order and purpose have no bearing because the children are only here to have fun.
There is a strange impulse to affirm unequivocally mothers’ “work,” yet we have culturally excluded housewives from the category of work. In this confusion, many mothers drift, not knowing why such an abundance of self-indulgence can make them so miserable. One possibility is the absence of work. Of course, even quite lackadaisical mothers still manage to work insofar as they supervise children, wipe snotty noses, and put some semblance of dinner on the table. But how much more powerful that work becomes when it is defined as such.
It’s not about whether the accomplishment of tasks is paid; that is not what makes work. Many people are seduced by the idea that the government should pay mothers to stay home with their children. Such a proposal is disastrous as it misaligns market incentives. Additionally, if the government pays you to have your children, government bureaucrats suddenly have a say in how many children you have and how you raise them. No, it’s not money that mothers need.
What is lacking in the lives of many mothers—as in the lives of their children—is the dignity of work. The recognition that the endeavor is serious, worthwhile and requires the development of attention and skill is the weighty reality of work. When you find a mother who has approached her life as her work, her hours, her home, and her children sometimes reflect that attention and skill.
Confining work to narrow, stratified office buildings is a peculiar modern fixation. Betty Friedan did not have to exile herself to a miserable, meaningless suburban life. In many a drab product of tract housing developing, interesting families are working alongside each other. There is an abundance of work in motherhood awaiting any woman who cares to try.
