Both sexes need to play on 'Home Team'

I walked out of "March of the Penguins" this past July and couldn't help but marvel at the fact that for two excruciating months during which they did not eat, the male penguins — the fathers — guarded their eggs from the extreme cold until they hatched, while the female penguins went out to replenish their own exhausted and malnourished bodies. I was amazed to discover the extent to which the male penguins shared in the responsibility of the survival of their offspring, even before they hatched. And so I thought, rather harmlessly, that perhaps we could all learn something from these devoted, stay-at-home dads.

I didn't consider this idea again until I read a September 20 article in The New York Times by Louise Story called, "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood." The basic theory at work here is that women at elite universities, despite a vast array of opportunities, are choosing motherhood over career and they are making this choice at an earlier age than ever before.

Perhaps the story itself is an unscientific exercise in "trendology," as Jack Shafer put it in a series of recent pieces in Slate. Still, it seems evident that something is terribly wrong when, as Yale's dean Peter Salovey put it, "so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn't constructed along traditional gender roles."

Only two of the 138 college-age women Story interviewed "expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers," and only two more said the decision would "[depend] on whose career was furthest along." With only a small handful of maverick women willing to entertain a gender-neutral approach to childrearing, these troubling statistics hint that our future families may not look very different from the ones our grandparents grew up in.

But since many of us are not starting a family right away, just how important are our current attitudes and expectations? Story preemptively deflects potential criticisms of her logical leaps by writing, "a person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices ten years later." Forgetting for a moment that Story here diminishes the one assumption that her entire piece hinges on, I think we should consider expectations extremely important when talking about this issue, as expectations both reflect and influence the prevailing social and cultural norms related to gender roles inside and outside of the family unit.

We ought to expect and demand certain things of ourselves as well. We should think about how easily we take the roles of men and women in childrearing for granted, and consider why we pursue higher education to challenge our preconceptions and expand our minds, only to later shrink them back into mass-produced porcelain molds labeled 'Mom' and 'Dad.' It should not take much mental energy to fathom a family unit within which the expectations of each parent are not based on gender-related preconceptions. And to those men who don't believe this issue is equally ours to confront, consider that the current model not only confines women to the maternal sphere, but precludes otherwise capable men from the enriching experience of being a fully participating parent.

President Tilghman was quoted in Story's piece as saying, "There is nothing inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent." I couldn't agree more: You could make a world of difference simply as a result of the day-today choices you make. We are all free to decide to leave the high-powered worlds of business, government and academia behind for a spot on the home team, but we must start treating this choice as one that should apply equally to both sexes.

Cynthia Liu, a sophomore at Yale, told Story, "My mother's always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time." Leaving the accuracy of that statement aside, we'll know we've made real progress as a society when its parallel, "You can't be the best career man and the best father at the same time," is as meaningful a statement as we make the former out to be. Freddie LaFemina is a history major from North Massapequa, N.Y. He can be reached at lafemina@princeton.edu.