By Rusty Pugh and Jim Brown
May 11, 2001

(AgapePress) - Despite efforts by some to have it abolished, Americans this weekend will continue a time-honored tradition of recognizing motherhood. Red and white carnations will abound, and the telephone companies will experience one of their busiest days of the year as millions of Americans pay tribute to their moms.

Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America says the idea of Mother's Day was initiated by Anna Jarvis in the late nineteenth century as a way to recognize the influence of mothers, increase respect for parents, and strengthen family bonds. The first Mother's Day observance finally took place in 1907. Wright says Mother's Day is special because it is something everyone has in common.

"So this was done to try and honor mothers [and] the work that mothers do, and to help it reestablish bonds that Americans all hold ... in common -- and that is that we respect motherhood."

Recently, Mother's Day has come under attack from fringe elements who see it as a threat to their unorthodox lifestyle. Wright cited the recent decision by a New York school to ban Mother's Day as an example, calling it an attack on the respect and honor Americans have for mothers as well as an attack on the concept of family.

America: A Daycare Nation?
Meanwhile, a former feminist scholar says America is a "daycare nation" that only pretends to honor moms. According to Forbes columnist and former university economics professor Dr. Jennifer Morse, motherhood is not respected in the United States. She says too many American homes have become what she calls "laissez-faire families," whose members pursue their own individual self-fulfillment. Committed mothers, she says, provide much more than a child will ever receive from the best daycare.

"What mothers do for their children is to build the basic bonds and the basic connections with the child," Morse says, "and the mother is quite literally the child's first connection with the rest of the human race."

Morse say it is sad that we set aside one day a year intended to honor mothers when, in fact, American culture has accepted the idea that low-wage workers provide an adequate substitute for moms.

"You could say that a high-quality daycare provider could provide attachment and bonding to the baby," she says, "but I don't think most mothers would really want the daycare provider to be the primary attachment figure because this is who the child looks to for direction, for guidance, and also ... who really matters the most to the child," she says.

The former feminist says after she adopted a badly neglected Romanian orphan, she realized just how much kids need their moms. "The key thing that children need in their development is a solid set of relationships," she says.

Morse also believes children of lasting marriages do much better than children of single-parent or divorced families.

"Children of lasting marriages do better in economic terms [and] they do better in educational terms -- they do better in school, they stay in school longer, they're more likely to go to college, they have better earning prospects," she says. "The life chances of a child are largely determined by whether their parents are married ... and by whether their parents remain married."

Morse is author of the book Love & Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work.

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