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My Mother, My BodyguardThe tug of war behind letting your kid ride the subway alone.

By Emily BazelonPosted Friday, April 18, 2008, at 2:17 PM ET

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Given this tilting, he thinks, the government should help rebalance the ledger. If mothers are to be really free to exercise their preference, tax and employment policies should better support women who don't want to work when their children are young. This way, "women who want to combine a life of motherhood and employment could have it all—one step at a time." Gilbert's proposal is a "home-care allowance"—presumably cash from the government—for women with children up to the age of 5. Maybe this would be offered in tandem with universal preschool. Or maybe on its own.

Gilbert promises that his home-care allowance "would not mean a return to traditional family life as it was practiced a half century ago." From his perspective, that's a credible claim, because Gilbert thinks he's pushing back against great and powerful forces, the exigencies of the labor market and the call to equality from elite feminists, arrayed in favor of women working. But I'm not convinced. I see the benefits, for many families, of an arrangement in which one parent devotes himself or herself full time to childrearing until the kids are old enough for kindergarten. (Though let's admit that the "him" in that last sentence is largely aspirational.) But what's the evidence that feminists and the market have tilted the work/don't work seesaw to the extent that Gilbert thinks? Women of means aren't necessarily working in ever-greater numbers. The data is as yet inconclusive; the numbers may be falling or static rather than rising.

Let's not underestimate the countervailing domestic pressures that help nudge middle-class and wealthy women out of the work force when they have kids. (Mothers in lower-income families, of necessity, face a different calculus.) As Gilbert acknowledges, for women whose husbands make good money, employment can already seem to have marginal economic value, once they subtract the cost of child care. Another attraction is the real pleasure of the rhythm of more constant togetherness with your child and the dense stay-at-home web of activities and friendships that many mothers weave.

And finally, what about the specter of accidents, of a solo subway ride that's not a lark. What if you put your child on public transportation because you can't pick him up—and the ride ends not in the joy of self-reliance, but in tears or worse? The odds of real harm are low, and yet Ida Tarbell's finger points at us across the decades. Gilbert, however, ignores it. In building up professional, work-driven feminists as the ones who are calling the shots, he discounts both the personal guilt and the societal guilt (should something happen to your kid) that also sits heavily on the scale.

Even if Gilbert doesn't make the connection, evidence of maternal guilt is easy to discern in his research. In discussing child care, he points out how hard it is to find high-quality preschools and day care centers. For Gilbert, that's all the more reason for a government-funded home-care allowance. But for mothers who want to or have to work, mediocre child care is the gift of guilt that never stops giving, the equivalent of the subway ride that could go wrong. The day my son broke his leg on the playground after school, while a babysitter was with him, I ran out of my office so the ambulance taking him to the hospital could pick me up en route. I tried not to blame myself for not having been there, and maybe the accident would have happened just the same if I had been, but it wasn't easy. Maybe the government could swoop in evenhandedly, with good universal preschool and a home-care allowance, and soothe the anxieties on all sides. Or maybe these policy choices are never so straightforward.