Free Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter

adoption, and their biological mother remains part of their lives and part of their birth narrative. Even so, when Ligtvoet is doing something like picking a sick child up from school, the world looks askance at him. “Every step we as a family take outside in public comes with a question from a stranger about the mother of the children: a motherless child seems unthinkable,” Ligtvoet writes.
    What children need above all is love, stability, stimulation, care, nurture, and consistency. Those are things that can come from an array of caregivers. Stability is key here, no matter what the parental arrangement is.A study from Ohio State showed that children from stable one-parent homes (homes where the caregiver was always single, from birth) fared as well on test scores as children from stable married homes.Conversely, a 2013 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation demonstrates that the biggest barriers to a child’s social, emotional, and physical well-being are rooted in poverty. It’s much easier, though, for pundits to fall back on the crutch of long-held cultural norms—that children need their mothers—than it is to confront and attempt to solve the more serious, endemic issues facing children.
HALF-TRUTH: “A MAN’S JOB IS TO PROVIDE”
    T HE ORIGINS OF THE DEEPLY held assumption and conviction that it is “a man’s job to provide” are actually biblical, from the New Testament.Saint Paul writes to Timothy, a young priest, that “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.”
    Understood as a command to take responsibility for those you love—those you either brought into the world or who cared for you in various ways—the injunction to provide is uncontroversial. Anyone who cares for anyone else is a provider. We provide love, food, clothing, shelter, nurture, education, solace, support, nursing, stimulation, and many other things for one another’s benefit. In an industrial or post-industrial economy, some of us provide income, in the form of money coming in from the outside in return for labor or investment. Others of us convert that income into the necessities and luxuries of life. Without income, there is nothing to convert, but without that conversion, the income itself cannot sustain life.
    Understood as a command to men only to provide income for the support of their households, however, Saint Paul’s dictum has very different and much more negative implications. There are similar precepts in chapter 4 of the Quran: “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means.” But why does “providing” or “supporting” mean money rather than care? The production of food rather than the preparation of it? The growing of flax rather than the spinning of it? The purchase of a car rather than the driving of it? The building of a house rather than the making of a home?
    Still, the idea that men have to provide is taken literally and quite seriously. Though stay-at-home dads have received considerablemedia coverage of late,a mere 2 million men identified themselves as such in 2012.Only 8 percent of Americans say they believe that children are better off with dads at home, compared with more than half who say children are better off with a stay-at-home mom. Furthermore, when Pew Research asked the question “How important is it for a man to be able to support a family financially if he wants to get married?” almost two-thirds of respondents said very important.When asked the same question with a gender flip, only a third of Americans say it is very important for women to be able to support a family before she gets married.
    These ingrained cultural assumptions, however, do not track with economic reality. The waves of globalization that hit us in the 1990s and 2000s created outsourcing opportunities that