In her 1997 book The Assault on Parenthood, Dana Mack writes that what she calls New Familism is found less in a return to full-time
mothering than in "increasingly inventive ways parents combine work and parenting"--such as telecommuting and tag-team arrangements between fathers and mothers working different shifts.
They appeared "overtly adult," trying to "play the mother," but often remaining only "the deprived little girl." On their projective tests, as in their relations with their children, some continued to be "fixed more on a sibling level than on a maternal level." In one extreme case, a forty-year-old who had long been an auxiliary mother to her brothers readily acknowledged that she had become only "one of the children in her own home." She recalled that shortly after her first child was born, she had already begun to cede "the mothering and physical care" of the infant to her husband.
Eventually, they would call them "at all times" for advice, and would not separate from them, coming to see t hem as the "mothering figure" for whom they evidently longed.