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The mainstream media, ironically right alongside demonizing teenage mothers, is full of stories about women realizing they can't "have it all," about leaving it too late to have babies or finding it difficult to afford the childcare necessary to go back to work (not going back to work is, often, a financial impossibility for some). We hear from women feeling isolated, stressed, and exhausted, or worrying about missing their children growing up. It's 2015—we need to become more open-minded about radically different schedules and family structures.If Morrison's "you need a whole community—everybody—to raise a child" arguments were true in 1989, they're even truer now. As she said, "The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units—people need a larger unit."There is a stereotype of young mothers being inherently neglectful of their children, not to mention the idea that they're all just benefit scroungers using a baby as an excuse to do nothing with their lives.
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