There are so many ways in which those of us who have chosen not to have kids are forced to pay for the choice of those who do. Must we add another?
100
“Americans still aren’t in agreement that mothers should work at all?!” Obviously the author doesn’t recall pushing Women into full time work in order to make up the difference between the list value of wages and the increasingly dramatic cost to sustain families. The economics of exploitive Capitalism destroyed the quality of families’ as the foundation of well adjusted children and a progressive society.
Americans in general are constantly manipulated by the demands for hyper growth of extreme Capitalism based on human exploitation. And the American people have never had as much political sway, as media portrays, about maintaining the value of Women as human beings, managers of families, homes, community sustainability and the development of healthy next generation contributors to American society.
In spite of this the American workplace would’ve remained cold, inattentive to labor, less productive and chaotically managed without the measurable contribution of female management styles since WWII, but most intensively over the last 50 years.
85
For thousands of years, mothers have relied on others to help them raise their children. Cooperative child-rearing, or alloparenting not only enabled mothers and children to thrive, but also shaped human evolution.
Mothers in hunting-and-gathering societies had alloparents to watch the kids while the mothers farmed and hunted. “Othermothers” have been a tradition in black families dating back to the days of slavery in the United States, and even longer in some African societies.
But today we idealize the nuclear family. That model may have been helpful in the preindustrial age, but that is not how we live anymore. Parents can't do it alone.
We should create policies that establish a community-based “village” of quality, trained, ongoing caregivers. Not only would it create a more nurturing and more just society of modern-day alloparents, it would finally give caregiving the respect it deserves.
98
I don’t think there were any hunting and gathering societies where some mothers hunted and farmed for 40 hrs a week while other women exclusively looked after the children. The scenario you’re describing doesn’t really translate to universal daycare. The modern equivalent would be more like a network of stay-at-home moms who trade babysitting on a frequent basis.
37
I don't see how any country can prosper if half of its brainpower is sidelined, either because it "isn't right" for women to work outside the home or because they're stuck in "nonprofessional" jobs because they took time off to care for children. We have political institutions and big businesses still mostly run by "white" males. Our governments are messes, we're stuck in endless, wasteful wars, and we tend to create the conditions for our economy to cycle faster and faster between boom and bust. I'd say we need all the brainpower and skill at our disposal to improve things. If women, or men for that matter, decide to be with their kids, that's fine with me. I had two female colleagues whose husbands "stayed home" with the kids and everything turned out great as far as I can see. In any event, in many places it's just about impossible for a family to avoid poverty if only one spouse has a paying job. The cat's kind of out of the bag on that one.
158
All of what is presented is true but I’ve researched this topic for more than a decade - including hundreds of interviews w US moms - and I’d say it’s more complicated. A lot has to do with the fact that we see parenting as a choice in which the consequences must be dealt with autonomously.
52
Higher education provides for better paid jobs and helps in the overall economic upliftment of the people. No one will require any kinds of subsidies then. For that to happen, affordable colleges is only option left.
I give our family example here. We have provided higher education to our daughter and son without incurring any educational loan. Our son has graduated from an ordinary Engineering college in Mumbai. Later he did M.Tech in IIT Kharagpur. We paid initially for his college admission and stay. Everything else he managed with his scholarship. Further we sent him to Belfast for his doctorate. Initially we spent money for his airfare, stay and admission. Rest he managed with his scholarship. Before that our daughter had done her Masters in Microbiology in India and later Masters in America. We paid for her airfare and stay for couple of months. Rest she managed by working in lab and by teaching students. We didn’t spend much for her Masters in India even. We never took any educational loan. All of this could be possible only on account of my wife also joining hands by working. We had our own problems in raising kids on account of both being employed. That’s another story entirely.
Our daughter left the job in America on account of her pregnancy in 2014. Luckily for her, our son in law, being an Ergonomist is having a decent job. As such our daughter is entirely taking care of our granddaughter, who is five years old now without any problems.
10
"Most Americans say it’s not ideal for a child to be raised by two working parents. Yet in two-thirds of American families, both parents work." It is unbelievable that this conversation is still taking place. Not whether there is universal daycare - something that is long overdue - but that for some, the elephant in the room is that both parents are working. Or more specifically that "mum" should not be the one working. How quaint and so 1950's. The reality is that society is different today than in the past. Parenting has always required choices. Society, for good or bad, has made it a financial requirement that for many, that choice is both parents need to work for pay. Those with greater financial means have other choices. Kids in daycare? Parent stays home? None of these scenarios dictate whether their is good or bad parenting involved. Good parents, be they a couple with one or two earners or a single parent who must work, are just that - good parents. The discussion around daycare or accommodation for a working parent shouldn't get sidetracked by what a family looks like or the employment status of parents.
71
I would add to the discussion the need to discuss - and eventually provide - one year of paid parental leave based on the Swedish model. I name one year whereas in truth a parent or parents can take parental leave as long as 18 months but providing more detail is for an article to do, not a comment.
My newest neighbors have 4 children and have been on parental leave - shared - since the birth of their most recent child, now approaching one year I believe.
The financial support they have received is based on the expected income they would have had were they to have simply continued working. They are well off but as I understand the Swedish system for support of children, higher income families have a right to the same support as lower income.
I suggest that this is important as concerns child care from the start of post-natal year two. It certainly must be easier to relinquish a child to day care or pre school if the first 12 to 18 months have spent with the child at home.
I marvel every morning when I go out to get my newspaper - early - and see a mother or father on a bicycle, perhaps with a trailer or other device to take a small child to some form of care.
Wish the Times would send a reporter to Sweden and report in detail.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
62
Social programs compete will the military for funding. The US depends on military prowess to maintain world dominance. A powerful military maintains the US Dollar's reserve currency status, enabling us to borrow unlimited sums of money.
Powerful militaries depend on male privilege, superior weapons, a willingness to use them, unquestioned obedience to a chain of command, physical prowess, and punishment for weakness.
Feminism threatens the male order. Social programs are what peaceful cultures engage in, not military ones like ours. We rationalize our theft of Indian land and the enslavement of blacks not on moral grounds, but on the notion that "might makes right," male dominance, and that God favors winners.
73
It would have been helpful if the author had at least mentioned what leaving the work force to care for children does to a woman’s future career prospects and security in old age. I suppose the author’s blind spot in this matter reflects that of society’s.
114
The argument over "work" has become a distortion from the mixed use of the term "work". Work Is NOT a "job". Work is activity. And human engage in activity, with or without a job. So, for instance, going to school is work. We have an activity called "homework" for students. At times that activity is ever more so demanding than cashier work in a grocery store.
"Job" is a particular type of work, it is associated with work for which one is paid. And typically paid by work for industry.
And typically for work in the "money making economy". As such when youths earn an allowance for their work in the household we do not term it a "job" but the exact same work performed in a restaurant is a "job" BUT both are work!
Now what do females in the household do? These WORK. The crux is that there is no money changing hands! And so we end up with the insane notion the woman must have a job for the honor of doing work.
Now the work in the household is often distinctly different from the work performed in the "market". Much of the "goods" producing sector requires distinctive work. However, much of the services sector is duplicated on a smaller scale in the household. A child has a cold. Visit a doctor and the service becomes a "job"; treat the child at home and...? YES, it is work.
Now humans have preferences for the work these perform. And household work has become low preference work. Somehow, work that is paid has assumed a preference often no matter how insignificant.
31
@Wolfgang Price
Paid work is preferable for many reasons. Compared to housekeeping and child-rearing, it is often more challenging, more enjoyable, more rewarding and provides respect and an active role in society.
Some women (and men) enjoy taking care of a house and children, but many do not. With paid work, there's an element of choice. People can choose their professions based on their interests and aptitudes. Being a stay-at-home parent is the same job for everyone.
The most important benefits of working outside the home are economic: more security for the family and economic independence for the woman. A woman who can't earn money can't leave an abusive husband, and she can't support the family in the event of her husband's death or disability.
I often think that people who argue that children need to have their mother at home are really saying that the father should be the dominant figure in the household. Yes, some do come out and say that. Nobody is denying that housework and childcare are work, but they are not the kind of work that gives a person freedom or the ability to demand equal standing in a marriage.
83
@Wolfgang Price
"Whan Adam delved and Eve span . . . ."
A picture of the post-neolithic household economy -- not as human as the hunter-gatherer society which preceded it but way more human than a society based on market labor.
Why more human? Because it satisfies a human's primary function -- the rearing of the next generation. Whether slung on her back or crawling around her feet, the infant is best reared by and with its mother. Later, when a moral character must be learned, the father will have a role, too.
No one said that being a parent is fun or exciting. It is a responsibility. If one is not prepared for the sacrifices required to carry out that responsibility, then, one should not have children.
8
I'm firmly of the opinion that when children are not yet self-aware, linguistically competent little people (before the age of 4-5) then it really doesn't matter who provides them with care, as long as they get quantity and quality of care from someone. I also have no desire to criticise in abstraction the quantity and quality of care that mothers tend to provide their children, but I believe the quantity and quality of care given by conscientious professionals would tend to be more and better.
Free or subsidised child care has the potential to not only provide the economic benefit in the short-term of greater female participation in the workforce, but also the longer term benefit of producing children more likely to become entrepreneurs, intellectuals and artists that can elevate all of the rest of us. Arguments against paid childcare for the children of all women, ignore that women of nobility have been utilising the services of others to care for their young children for millennia.
26
@GRW Can you point me to any studies proving that children who receive free or subsidized child care are any more likely to become great entrepreneurs, intellectuals, or artists, than children who receive similar child care fully paid for by the parents? Or directly provided by a parent? Because most people grow up to become OK, but pretty ordinary. And if not, is the issue their early child care, or natural high intelligence, or attending a really good university, or ???
3
@GRW Sorry, in first para above should say ".....care that actual individual mothers provide to their children,...." and "....conscientious trained professionals....".
Also I should say explicitly that I believe it is after age 4-5 that specifically parental care (quality more than quantity) is important for children - both from mothers and fathers.
2
I am appalled by the number of commenters here who must not have read this article and are presuming that day care is only needed by two-parent households where a woman chooses to work. What about all of the divorced or otherwise single mothers who have to support themselves and their children — they have to work while finding someone to care for their child when they can’t be at home. And even college educated women these days, such as teachers, may have a hard time being able to find and afford private day care facilities on the salaries they make as a single parent. That’s why publicly sponsored affordable day care is being discussed.
96
Coming from the Soviet Union, I’m the 5th generation of working mothers. Going back to the 1920s, women were expected to be part of the proletariat and contribute to the common good along with men.
There was no harm in it. I recall wonderful, indulgent weekend in toy stores and amusement parks with my mother and weekdays filled with imaginative play among a dozen three year olds.
So we want women to stay home with children, but we do not want to offer them welfare when they cannot afford to do so. How exactly do we reconcile our prejudiced views?
84
I have no children of my own and I have no problem with a more robust public investment when it comes to childcare. Corporate America bought off our government and created this economy and corporate America can pay more for their workers childcare. It would be beneficial to both the employer and the employees not to mention it would make America great again.
44
I’m a feminist, but don’t support government-subsidized childcare, except for poor families
This has zero to do with my views on working mothers. Why should i subsidize person in this capacity? Most of the two income parents i know live vastly better than i do.
And correlation does t equal causation with childcare expenses and rate of working women. The three states you mention are much wealthier than the Dakotas and Nebraska, where it’s harder to opt out of the work force
12
@Amy M Because it benefits society and not just specific families. Children receiving quality child care are less likely to end up doing prison time and more likely to become tax paying citizens who will help support you when you are old.
78
Affordable high quality child care is a necessity for the children whose parents work outside the home. That said, feminism did mothers a disservice advocating that they join the workforce on a full time basis. Feminism should have advocated for shorter work weeks, where each parent could work half time. In the 1950's one income could support a family, including home ownership. Now two parents must work full time or more for a family to survive often without home ownership. Both parents working full time has given rise to harried parents, hurried children and childhoods spent growing up in day cares. If parents worked each half time, children could grow up in their own homes with their own parents - and more often than not, having a far better childhood than even the very best of day cares could offer.
28
@M Employment hours have little to do with feminism, or really, with parenthood. Companies hire the employees who are most valuable to them. They may want employees who work 40 hours a week, they may want employees who work more than 40 hours a week, they may want employees who only work part time. Sometimes they want "permanent" employees, sometimes they want contractors/freelancers. And most companies don't pay any higher salaries or wages than they need to, or provide any more benefits than they need to. They lay off at will. It is up to the employee to find a job that works well for him/her in his/her situation, whether he/she has children or not. Considering how many people in the work force are underpaid and/or underemployed, higher salaries and more job security would benefit a great many. But I see no way to bring this about, other than legally mandating a higher minimum wage and some restrictions on overtime (more than 40 hours a week). I really don't see a return to the one-earner family. It's never been a norm. Even in the 1950s, many women worked full time, though their career opportunities were restricted.
21
@M What you describe is appealing and would likely be good for families, children and parents. However, blaming the mothers and feminists for where we are today is not helpful. Women fought for the ability to be independent and take care of their children, so they would not have to stay in abusive marriages. It may not have turned out perfectly for everyone, but it was a necessary change. Things can always be improved, but that takes change on the part of everyone in the culture.
31
My mother didn’t have to work until the year I was nine and the oil business were into bust mode and that’s what my father did. He found another, less well-paying job and my mother found a job in the school cafeteria for a few months.
I hated her working. It upset my life, I had no homemade snack when I got home from school and I had to do a few things for myself, like hanging up my clothes and I think I even washed a few dishes. I was a spoiled, in many ways, only child, and I noted that my life changed when my mother was not at my beck and call. The oil business recovered, as it always did, my father went back to doing what he did and my mother made it through the school year, never to work again until I got married.
Many of my friends had mothers who worked, either on farms or in factories. They had to. Child care for pre school children was provided either by families or childcare became a paid job for another woman.
America still can’t figure out what do do with its females. A big part of the population thinks absolutely that Barefoot and Pregnant is the way to go and a big part thinks females should be able to do anything men can do. We are at war over the issue, and you can see why universal childcare would be a flashpoint.
24
@DKHatt
"America still can’t figure out what do do with its females."
Please stop talking about women as if we're steers on a feed lot. Thanks.
117
In the 80's the Republicans, led by Ronald Reagan himself, killed off the unions. As a young man I had followed my father into the Teamsters forsaking college. I got married and children followed. The company I worked for managed to kick out the union, as did all their competition. My father, who earned $ 60k a year, went into management. My earnings fell to $ 15k a year about $ 300 a week.
There was no way I was going to maintain the house and the bills on $300 a week. My wife took a job in government. EEO was very big at that time. She received paid training and moved up the ranks. Child care was EXPENSIVE, and finding good care was a hassle. Soon, I was out of a job. Recession. Wife's job was recession proof. She made more $ than I did/could. As a white male with just a H.S. diploma, I couldn't find anything that paid more than minimum wage. (My wife didn't have anymore education than I did.)That BARELY covered the child care costs. Someone managed to kill off the timber industry and the mills closed down. Guess who took over the child care? ONE of The Forgotten White Males from Oregon.
I tried to retrain. Tried college. ( A.D.D., not diagnosed until my mid 40's) Tried my own business. Tried. I wasn't female. I wasn't a person of color. I wasn't a female AND a person of color.
My children usually had one parent at home. It is a time in my life I cherish. However, when it's Dad at home, he's stigmatized as a loser. That's what my children are left with. Gee, Thanks.
55
@Forgotten White Male
Stigmatizing stay at home dads is foolish as denigrating stay at home moms. You provided more for your kids by being on their lives than you would have by being in the workplace.
40
This is exactly why we need paid parental leave for both parents AND subsidized childcare. In Sweden where both parents are able to take time off there is no stigma about fathers being the primary childcare provider because this is shared equally at some point if a family chooses. Americans need to wake up and see how social democratic policies actually make your life better. And guess what? We already pay as much in taxes as Swedes do. Because your daycare costs, hospital bills, education costs, retirement savings are basically taxes too.
37
@Forgotten White Male
You were denied work in your most productive years of employment. Saying you should be retrained in a different line of work, so good to know, but when you present your resume you have nothing to show. So if you are lucky you may earn minimum wage fortunately for you your wife had a secure income, but not enough to pay for day care.
The death of unions , who gave us the middle class, has done more than anything to destroy America. Unions became a dirty word. Now it is impossible for one earner families to exist. Both parents coming home from work are exhausted......day care is unaffordable and then who is there to oversee children after work hours. But both parents must keep their jobs because now there is no such thing as job security, health insurance. Parents have to stay in lower paying jobs in case of loss of employment of one. But the 10% are making more than ever because there is no trick,e down economy thanks to Reagan and Trump. Unions only asked for living wages. Civil service positions are basically unions under another name.
8
My husband is a physician. Most of his medical group partners are women. A few of their husbands stay home AND send the kids to daycare. Imagine a mother doing that. There would be no end to the mom-shaming.
33
@Lambnoe
Who would do the shamming?
2
@AK
Hmm -- everyone.
21
Why would we subsidize for-profit childcare businesses while withholding the same public support from women who could use assistance as they forgo paid work and stay home to care for children or loved ones? Why is professional outsourced childcare worthy of the public purse and full-throated endorsements in the NYT, while stay-at-home parenting is treated like some kind of demeaning burden?
24
@James If the government were to provide subsidies for stay-at-home parenting, then I'd say the people who get the subsidies should have to meet some standards or have some qualifications.
4
@James Thank you! My thoughts early in this article as well.
1
@DLM - why? If the goal is to help parents with childcare, I see no reason not to make it universal. Would go a long way towards ending poverty and hunger for families with young children.
But if the goal is instead to remake family life in the United States, by punishing those who are already struggling in competition against families engaged in the two-income rat race, then sure, let's direct government funds to only certain childcare providers. Perhaps next, we can create a new federal Dept of Children that will exercise full authority over universal education and socialization of our young, lest some unqualified parents contaminate them with their wrongthink, low standards, and lack of qualifications.
4
Excellent and informative article — thank you for this. It helps to see why things like lack of quality, affordable childcare continue in the United States. Only with this kind of factual and historical information can we make arguments to change minds and change policy. This is how we construct a more equal and fair society for all men and women. This is how we help children.
5
The U.S. is stuck in a previous century and every day it's becoming less clear which century that is. We are not a "modern" country compared with other developed countries.
46
@CW Sometimes it seems to me that the US is trying to return to a 1950s that never existed except on TV.
30
We don’t remotely provide high quality k12 education to every child in the US, so what makes anyone think we could provide high quality childcare simply because the government starts paying for it?
34
Geezer morality. It won't be long. Just chill for a bit.
5
As usual, the hypocrisy of people’s opinions disadvantages those who are on the poorer end of the economy.
Another example is people saying “my child’s education is most important” and then turning down more money for schools because “it’s wasted”. The wealthy still get the best, others make due. You can’t fix stupid, or hypocrisy.
18
This is a bad idea, and one more step toward all of us being completely dependent on government, cradle to grave. Dull. If you can’t take care of your kids by either paying for day care or staying home with them, then reconsider your plan. I’m not interested in paying for your child’s daycare.
13
@Mike, yeah and we should stop subsidizng the roads and hospitals and gas and food that you use too. I mean,
if you can't do everything all yourself what use are you to society, right??
66
@Mike No worries. I don’t think my kid is interested in doing your triple bypass, so it all works out in the end.
49
So, let’s redefine “family “ with exact parameters and specific duties, and then license it. Then issue permits to procreate.
There, we all agree, no muss, no fuss. It’s the law.
3
@Susan I don't think there is anything sacred about "families"--which to some people means not just a married couple, but a married couple with minor children. The "nuclear family" is just one of many lifestyles. Therefore, I don't see that it is any more worth of preservation and support than couples who have chosen not to have children, people who have chosen to remain single, people who have divorced, elderly couples whose children have grown up and moved out, etc.
5
The system is always rigged against women. Just read the Bible and one realizes this has been going on for thousands of years.
27
Unless you need day care for your children, you are not aware of its costs. I know of a middle school teacher who went back to work after her child was born; after paying for her family's health insurance and the baby's day care her take home pay is around $20 a week. Why does she work? To keep her teaching spot. She has her master's degree and would not be rehired.
34
@Linda Bell
Yes, it is expensive. We pay $17,500 per year in preschool tuition, which is the going rate for 8:30am-5:00pm care.
That's more than a year of undergrad tuition at our local university. We are so grateful to the wonderful teachers at the school, who are paid well and have master's degrees. Every child deserves to have a quality education starting in early childhood. I hope not just affluent families can have this for their children in America soon.
16
Why does the day care cost come out of her paycheck and not her husband’s as well? Child care costs are a family cost. Not the woman’s by default.
16
@Liz Don't read more into this. The point is that she has next to nothing left after work. Not who pays for what. And, if she has less money, her husband also has less as he picks up more of the expenses.
6
There wouldn't be such a pressing need for universal healthcare if Congress ended the War on Drugs and revoked the monopoly on prescription authority that doctors enjoy. There are many countries where citizens can obtain many drugs over-the-counter without a doctor's prescription. Why should anyone need a prescription to test his or her testosterone or estrogen levels, or their B-12 levels? Why is there so much government-mandated paperwork in medicine? These laws simply support the outrageous profit margins of the medical-industrial complex. The Afghan poppy farmer has more freedom than the average American. At least he's not considered a "deplorable" if he lacks health insurance, and it’s not illegal for him to treat his own illness.
2
@Bill
So you understand the variation of testosterone levels over the course of the day and it's interesting with proteins in the blood and the risks and dosing of testosterone? And when exactly is it appropriate to check an estrogen level? And which estrogen?
3
@Bill
So you understand the variation of testosterone levels over the course of the day and it's interesting with proteins in the blood and the risks and dosing of testosterone?
"The result is a divided system, in which good child care is accessible only to affluent families"
There we go again, pretending there are only two groups in this country: the wealthy and the poor. In reality the middle class has to deal with child care too, and we are absolutely drowning. No one, including the media, cares.
26
Children are a privilege and a responsibility, not an entitlement. Good parents do what is required to nurture and provide for their children. No parent, regardless of gender, has a “right” to place their career aspirations ahead of what is best for their child. Parenthood requires hard decision and sacrifice. If you are not prepared for that don’t have children and most certainly don’t assume that the government is obliged to make parenting “easier”.
16
@FNL Who needs children? Who is going to be running things when we current adults are too old and infirm to do so? Who will be our doctors and the people who push our wheelchairs around when we are too infirm to do things for ourselves? We all need children, well taken care of, well educated children. That's why childcare is a societal issue, not just a personal one.
49
@Carole Goldberg
There is no shortage of labor.
6
Hope you are not one of those conservatives complaining about how “ low” the native birth rate is in the US? How those young “ white”women need to have more babies. Can not have it both ways- it is an economic choice- children are expensive and many people can not afford them.
13
It's a complicated issue, also considering that the planet is overpopulated in general there is no need to encourage people to have children at any income level.
As we no longer have the family farm or business for the most part, children are a luxury item even in the families that have money. We have children because we want lovely small beings in our image, and it is our responsibility to make sure they are cared for.
To those who say we need their support as future taxpayers, what about all the children who never make it to that point, because they are disabled, autistic, drug addicted or any of the other things that can keep them from being productive members of society.
So it should not be incumbent on taxpayers to undertake someone else's family planning.
Also who decides who these caregivers would be?
Many of the nannies I see I would never have trusted to take care of my children when they were young.
And so often you see some public school employee molesting children because of insufficient background checks, so I hesitate to make the government in control of child care.
Individual companies may give in house care as part of their benefits package which makes sense if they feel they need it to keep their employees.
But overall the choice to have children is personal, and should be that families responsibility.
I do also support birth control and abortion, so I am not forcing women to have children, it should be a well thought out choice.
11
@marie, child molesters work at private schools too. Epstein worked at Dalton.
14
This has never been a country that likes women or children. Just look at the laws we pass. We are a Patriarchal society that is terrified of working mothers. It decreases the power men have held onto since the beginning of time. I do not believe male politicians will ever do what is necessary to ensure women are able to reach their potential. So the obvious answer is there must be more women in Congress and a woman president. Only then will women get the support they need to be be treated as equals.
51
@Mickey Topol
Enough with the misandry. Pre industrial societies were very egalitarian. At best, the patriarchy has been around for a very brief part of human history.
1
Of course, the dilemma about “whether women should work at all” is answered when it comes to lower income women - As is indicated by every public policy and popular conversation, the answer is, “Yes.” When low income women or women of color don’t work out of the house, for whatever reason, the critical opprobrium is swift and unyielding.
29
my take is that, americans still are not in agreement that it is society's duty to take on responsitilities that young parents have chosen to assume when they had their kids. Americans already pay property taxes to support schools and the vast majority of americans dont get the numerous tax deductions that young parents enjoy. Most americans are not sure they want to pay for family leave for the young parents who assumed responsilities when they decided to have kids. ----it is not fair that the young parents get all the media attention. --young parents are always asking for special treatment from politicians. it is too bad that there is absolutely no public sentiment for increasing universal health dollars to expand long term care for elderly, who need it help more than children. daughters and sons who work have huge problems taking care of elderly parents. I think there should be more political attention to caring for the older generation , and keeping them out of awful institutions, and less political attention to granting more handouts for young parents
7
As a survivor of eight years of early childhood institutional setting care, I can attest I witnessed some of the most severe abuse, especially as one of my caregivers scalped several boys in an early morning rampage. In the same setting, we had a pedophile who abused several young boys. Institutional care can be brutal.
7
@bnc Most child abuse happens in the family, though.
7
@bnc This was a domestic terror event.
Low-income women have always worked outside the home.
25
If men were the predominant caregivers to children, this would have been passed long, long ago.
29
If our country actually cared about child development, it would support widely accessible, quality childcare. If our country supported newborn and maternal health, it would provide universal health care and paid parental leave. If our country actually wanted to limit the number of abortions, it would support sexual education and easy access to contraception. But only some people actually care about families. The powerful others just want to keep their piece of the pie: they don’t want to cede opportunities to women smarter than them; they don’t want to have to do their own dishes; they don’t want to have to change their macho, unprofessional behavior or make the workplace hospitable to anyone not in their club. The mediocre men in power are so threatened by losing their unwarranted positions to minorities and women outsmarting them and trying to make the world kinder, and they are outraged by the men who dare see women as people.
46
@Woman With A Brain
Though you said something to this effect, I feel an emphasis on the impact of income inequality is called for.
To make a simple statement, the only behavior that is incentivized is greed. If costs were truly accounted for, single earner families would be commonplace(IMHO). How could you possibly prefer a workplace to raising your children, whether you are male or female. This is the power of the pressure to gain, because if you don't, the next guy or gal will. Period.
I understand many people love their work, but work is structured to serve the workplace and the increasingly abstracted marketplace.
If somehow "fair" were expressed in terms of well being instead of cash, I suppose things could be different.
2
I’m sick of conservatives like Carlson trying to guilt working parents, but providing no support to families. Young couples today see exorbitant costs to raise children, not just day care but health care, food and clothing etc. Add on housing costs and student loans and it’s all you can do to afford one child. Stop trying to blame women and moms!
30
But having children is a *choice* and both parents should be prepared for the costs.
7
@Frances Grimble, about 50% of pregnancies are unplanned.
9
I’m sick of conservatives like Carlson trying to guilt working parents, but providing no support to families. Young couples today see exorbitant costs to raise children, not just day care but health care, food and clothing etc. Add on housing costs and student loans and it’s all you can do to afford one child. Stop trying to blame women and moms!
5
Let's talk about what happens to those stay at home moms when daddy decides to bail out on the marriage. She's been out of the job market, and with rusty skills, if any, she is now setting up for a much lower standard of living for both herself and her children, regardless if the guy pays his child support or not. Often not.
Women working protects them, their children, their future.
134
Best comment- paid employment is a type of insurance for women and their children- a decent standard of living.
25
Hold on a second - those very liberal states, California, Oregon and Washington, have the most expensive child care and shortest school days, and the conservative Dakotas and Nebraska handle things better? What's going on here? This isn't the red-state-blue-state division one might expect.
7
Sharing resources with everyone is expensive- quality and access decrease without public buy-in and immense social will.
If, instead of giving families credit on their income tax returns for child care we paid parents to stay at home and care for their children and gave them credit towards social security, perhaps we could return to the days where one parent does remain home to care for the children until they are in grade school. But we don't do that. We insist that parents who are not rich have a patchwork system that can fail because one person is ill, someone moves, or someone doesn't have transportation.
Corporations in America cater solely to the most valuable employees, most of whom are not women. In other words, in America families, health, the pursuit of happiness, are not important unless one has no need of any subsidies or one is a corporation receiving welfare/tax breaks from the government. If this attitude isn't elitist in nature I don't know what is.
It's good for children to see that both parents are valued and compensated in monetary terms for what they do. It's good for children to spend more than just special occasions with their parents. Yet American politicians and Americans want to treat child care or any sort of family care as if it's not their concern. How wrong that is. Employees who know that their children are safe can concentrate on work. The same goes for employees with elderly parents or sick family members.
21
So if a parent stays home to care for young children, they are not 'working' (haha). But if someone is PAID to care for the same children, either in the home or in a daycare situation,
they are 'working'. Say what ? There seems to be a cognitive
disconnect here, based on the assumption that parental child-care is not 'work' but non-parental childcare is.
49
I could not imagine not earning a living. I could not imagine demonstrating such an approach to life to my two sons. I am proud of the fact that I have raised them as a working mother. And they are proud of me. Given that, the thing we did do is rent housing in very close proximity to my workplace and their schools. I did not have a commute eating up time and was readily available if something came up. As a result of this commitment to work and child rearin g we do not own a house.
23
Now that I’m of retirement age, I look back on my stay-at-home mom days with regret. Not because it wasn’t wonderfully rewarding, but because all of my physical, mental and emotional labor during those years was sneered upon then and is penalized now. My Social Security statement means I’ve been set up for poverty...because I stayed home with my kids during the peak, foundational years for a career.
88
@Libby Maxey You have hit the nail on the head. If Americans genuinely valued stay-at-home parenting, it would be pensionable work, even if it wasn’t salaried work at the time it was performed.
48
@Global Charm American women who have spent their entire careers as housewives do, in fact, receive Social Security benefits. Even if they have been widowed or divorced.
1
$700 per month is the social security benefit if you did not work.
16
We don’t have an economic infrastructure ( free daycare, preschool, health insurance, maternal and paternal leave, etc.) that supports children and child rearing, mothers and families.
Furthermore, young people are graduating with student debt.
Just how much - can individuals and families really handle.
From what I see walking around my city - I see lots of people with dogs, sitting in cafes, restaurants.
I see less of young children, mothers, families.
What kind of culture, economy are we creating?
13
@mk Not everyone has to be married, not everyone needs to have children. This is a better society than the 1950s in that people have more options. And there's nothing unhappy or wrong about taking your dog for a walk that includes a coffee drink break, or a nice lunch, for you. The dogs seem to enjoy it too!
10
Why no universal child care? Same reason as no universal health care. Same reason as low minimum wage. Same reason as no affordable college. Corporations who own congress don’t want these things.
62
@Paul Ruszczyk Yes. And it will only get worse as those corporations need less and less employees because of automaton and technological changes. Guaranteed incomes of some type are going to be a big issue in the future unless we want to regress to an economic condition that is truly horrendous.
11
Let's look at it this way.
Child care is the responsibility of the parents.
Whether both work, or only one works, is a function of the degradation of the American working and middle classes.
My mother did not work for a salary outside the home. My parents worked hard to make this possible.
I read daily of complaints about the impossibility of finding health care for young children, as though this were enshrined in the Constitution.
What ever happened to supporting the children that you generate?
If you cannot care for them without state subsidies, then don't have them. No matter how cute they are.
12
@Padonna Sometimes we like to do things collectively, and we look to our elected representatives to make this possible. No one is trying to evade responsibility here.
8
@Padonna and then when society ages and there are no children, the way it's happening in Japan and Korea, what then? To a certain extent, investment in children is for the beneift of the country and society. It's a very strange way of thought in the US that this isn't recognized.
14
Very interesting article. Child care whether subsidised or taken care of fully is no replacement of parental affection. Children grow properly if one of the parents, preferably mother takes care of the children. No one can replace the mother as far as affection and parenting is concerned. That’s a fact.
It’s very much true that middle class is finding extremely difficult to manage the show given the cost of living in cities and ever increasing rents and for having a shelter of their own with single member earning in the family. Further on account of increasing educational qualifications, women don’t prefer to stay at home. Instead they have their own plans regarding financial independence and professional growth. As such working couple have the added advantage of financial cushion in achieving the desired goals.
Working couple invariably have to depend upon the third party for the child care if they don’t have elderly support at home. The third party child care all said and done is third party only as far as affection and family touch is concerned however efficient the child care may be irrespective of the money. The children grown that way always long for much wanted family bonding and affection and even develop some sort of inferiority complex as they grow.
Blessed are those couples, who have parental support and guidance to take care of the children when they go for work.
3
While true that childcare is no replacement for parental affection, it doesn’t mean a child in childcare does not have the same attachment to their parents or experiences less affection than those at home with a parent. Universal childcare should not be an argument about mothers working or not, it should focus on giving our children a level playing field for all kids but especially those with disadvantaged backgrounds. https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/136/6/1112.full.pdf
7
I think raising your own children should be a human right. It breaks my heart that there are women who would love to stay home with their babies, but have to put them in daycare so the mother can get a job (often a menial, unfulfilling one) to make money for food and housing. Rather than focusing on subsidized childcare, I would rather my tax money be spent on affordable housing, long maternity leaves, living wage, and food stamps, so that people can have more financial leeway to make a choice about how they raise their children.
19
@L On a vastly overpopulated planet, I don't think even having children is a right.
8
You clearly have issues with children and this topic. Enjoy your dog, cappuccino and single existence. Sounds like you earned it.
11
It surprises me that on almost every poll I read on work, it states something like 80% of people do not like their jobs.
I would stay home with my kids as long as possible if I had a husband who could cover the expenses while I raised the family and took care of everything else. I don't think anyone that is paid can love your kids as much as you do.
19
@cedar Even though some people need to take jobs they dislike (at least sometimes) for financial reasons, that is no reason to have children so you can stay at home with them.
3
As a grandma who provides child care my young grandchildren - it is wonderful. But it requires a lot of energy and can have boring periods of isolation. I prep daily to motivate myself to be engaged and present for the little ones. Having done childcare as a young mom and a grandma - it is not a vacation but challenging every day job.
14
And should be paid and pensioned as a the “proper job” and essential, existential task of rearing and raising the next generation.
Your dog will not take care of you when you are old- he cannot pump your gas, perform surgeries on you, check out your groceries or pay into social security.
7
I don't see kids with two working parents as less well adjusted or even less pampered than those with a stay-at-home parent. In fact, I notice most kids with a stay-at-home parent often feel trapped and coerced into being someone's only vocation. What seems more interesting to me are the stay-at-home parents, usually women, who are financially dependent on a spouse, usually a man, and the message this continues to transmit to the next generation, particularly girls: Financial dependence on a man is acceptable. It's not. And no amount of feminist posturing or leftist rhetoric (and I am both a feminist and on the Left) will compensate for being financially dependent on a man. As long as women continue to feel that they don't need to earn a living, workplaces will continue to persist with gender pay disparities and the broader American society will continue to devalue women's careers as "choices", like hobbies. Time's up, women: Stop pretending that being a stay-at-home parent is a feminist stand. It's not. Financial independence for you as a parent is.
40
Until there is an effective way to prevent gender discrimination in the workplace, employers will want to pay women less. Regardless of whether they are married and whether they have children. It saves the employer money.
13
@Frances Grimble That's not the point, though. The point is that as long as women are raised to believe earning a living is a "choice", that dependency on a man's earnings is a "choice", employers will take women's careers less seriously, pay them less, and promote them less. Women play into this when they ponder whether they should be a stay-at-home parent far, far more often and openly than men do. If men are to be the "earner" and women are to be, along with the children, another dependent on the man's income, women will not be considered equals in the workplace when they do, in fact, pursue a career.
18
@Tintin it's not that women feel that they don't need to work. The problem is that paying for child care often costs more than the salary the woman (and most of the time it is the woman) brings home. Then there is the problem of deducting the cost. So women lose twice: once because they don't accrue social security credits when they don't work and again because if they do work it's usually not worth it. This is because employers don't value women as employees, not because women don't want to work. In case you haven't noticed this discrimination/gender gap occurs with all women whether they are single, married, divorced, or extremely well educated.
15
What's ideal depends on the definition, and that is going to vary from family to family.
My ideal would be independent wealth, the ability to raise my kids at home, and some sort of work that was mostly there to keep me intellectually invested, and could be scheduled around the kids until they are ready for school.
I didn't get to live that ideal. I traded a fair amount of earnings for the ability to not outsource child care; that is not a decision I could make today, with today's jobs and wages. I may have been part of the last group of people for whom staying at home was an option a lot of people could take up.
Someone else's ideal might be to focus on career, knowing the kids were in good hands, and that the best for the family was security and parents who are not likely to go crazy form cabin fever.
And for another, ideal doesn't even enter the equation. It is all about meeting basic economic priorities - a roof, food, clothes, internet.
Tucker Carlson speaks from a place in which his ideal is for someone else - not male - to rebuild a 1950s sitcom society; one that never was reality.
42
How interesting that I just had this conversation with my young adult daughter today. No one else besides the individual woman has the right to decide if she works outside of the home or not. I would never have been fulfilled as a person had I stayed home with my children and not used my extensive years of higher education. My children suffered no psychological trauma because I was not with them constantly. As a matter of fact, I spent far more quality time with my children than my own stay-at-home mother spent with me and my siblings. My suggestion to everyone is to stay out of others' business and let them be the parent they choose to be.
39
@Julie Actually, someone other than the woman does indeed have a right to decide if she works outside the home or not: Whomever is supporting her financially. Let's not turn being a stay-at-home-mom into a feminist achievement. You chose otherwise, and bravo, because just as men are raised to believe they must be earners, so too should women who value gender equality.
10
@Tintin
What you refuse to acknowledge is that not all 'earnings' are monetary.
5
@Tintin are you similarly offended when men choose to stay at home and their wives work, which is growing increasingly common? Or does your brand of feminism just focus on attacking women?
7
Here's a simple explanation for why we don't have universal child care: The relatively affluent don't want to pay taxes to support the kids of the non-affluent who would benefit the most from such policies. It really is that simple.
53
@Doug I'm one of the relatively affluent. I more or less support the idea of government-provided childcare for the children of the non-affluent. I think parents should carefully plan ahead for their expenses, and not have any children they can't afford. But I accept that some parents, through divorce, illness, or misfortune, don't have life turn out the way they planned. I do not support government-provided childcare for the parents I encounter who are able to pay for childcare, and are paying for it, but would rather have the money or better career opportunities instead. I think government-provided childcare should be subject to a means test. Just like government-provided housing and food.
6
@Frances Grimble
Until the 20th century government funded elementary schools were not widely available in the United States. By 1940 only 50% of Americans had a high school diploma. You could make the same argument about schooling as you have made for daycare. Why should you have to pay taxes for public schools? People shouldn't have children if they can't afford to pay for private schooling for them. We pay taxes for schools because everyone benefits from an educated populace. If daycare were at least subsidized and well-regulated, everyone would benefit from more women in the workforce and children would be better prepared for school. But as you point out that means (God
forbid!) higher taxes.
30
@James, Toronto, CANADA My husband and I chose not to have children, yet we're already paying for other people's children's K-12 education, plus the state college system. There's a limit. Surely the parents can bear the costs of four years or so of daycare per child? They chose to become parents, after all.
7
There is a lot to unpack on this issue. It may be worth also to ask what is most natural? It is the Mother who produces milk, not the Father, and the baby drinks almost exclusively her milk for the first 6-8 months, or more, before solids begin to play a role. My child is nearly one and is just beginning to show interest in non-boob-milk foods. Yes Dad or another caregiver can give a bottle but that's straying from what nature implies. Of course one can get lost in the forest of possibilities - what if the Mother can't breastfeed, etc, but truly that is the rarity. Maybe it is okay that the baby needs Mom more for the first 1-2+ years, and maybe it's okay that she doesn't advance as much in her field because she took some time off to nurture the next generation. Getting stuck on the numbers of equal pay is not the path. Thinking of what's best for the children is.
6
@Jennifer Sweet
Natural would be not having any access to contraception and having as many children as you could with the hope that at least some would survive childhood and then possibly dying in childbirth or if you’re lucky make it to 45. Natural is not benign.
14
@Jennifer Sweet this is all true, but those early years are gone in a flash and are far from the whole picture.
2
@Jennifer Sweet I and many other children born in the 1950s were bottle fed, which was the trend at the time. We are no worse off for it.
8
Is there any information available on whether children benefit more in their early years from care by a family member (parent, grandparent, aunt/uncle, older sibling) than from care by a stranger?
And surely at the root of the idea that women with children shouldn't work outside the home is the belief that children need their mothers, that the mother-child relationship is unique (and different from the father-child relationship) and necessary to the psycholgocial and emotional development of the child. Is that belief unfounded? Or is it valid? If you want to convince people that it is okay, even good, for women with children to work outside the home, I think you have to address that belief, especially if it is unfounded.
9
@meh
Sure there's data. They show safety is best in day care centers. Deaths of children in nonparental care are highest when the caregiver is a relative, and lowest in center-based care.
6
@meh If you want women to stay at home then you also need to support economic policies making it possible for one income to support a family. For the vast majority of Americans that's not possible in 2019.
4
As long as this "one parent should stay home, and it should probably be the mother" attitude persists, employers will cling to it as justification for the gender pay gap. I'm a woman who chooses not to have children, but since I'm a healthy woman of child-bearing years, I still get the "motherhood penalty" that is somehow entrenched still, because I technically could get pregnant what with this goshdarned confounding uterus of mine.
35
There a lot of issues here. The first is that the feminist movement is a women’s movement, it is not exclusively a labour movement, although opening up opportunities for women is an important part of it. The second is that the workforce is designed on a model that assumes a male full-time bread-winner with a full-time wife and mother at home. Hence, long hours (especially for professionals) which leave little time and energy for other demands. The third is that I believe once a critical mass of women break the glass ceiling and enter management ranks, more flexible working arrangements for women and men will become more commonplace. The fourth is that greater access to childcare and/or longer school hours would make it easier for women - although they are only one part of what is needed. Also, we should distinguish between babies and infants and older children. My experience is that babies and very young children benefit from the love and continuity of care given by one or two primary caregivers and that this option should be supported where possible. The fifth is that childcare is both real and important work and should be more highly valued in society. It should also be seen as something that benefits parents in terms of developing better organisation and soft skills like communication, anticipating others needs, motivating and negotiating with others. Parenthood should be seen as a positive personal development opportunity instead of a disability in the workplace.
19
@Kay "Hence, long hours (especially for professionals) which leave little time and energy for other demands. "
This is also an artifact of our healthcare system. It is cheaper to provide healthcare for one 40 hour employee than 2 20 hour employees. If we do achieve some form of single - payer, I'd expect part time work to become more desirable.
"My experience is that babies and very young children benefit from the love and continuity of care given by one or two primary caregivers"
Mine is: the more, the better.
...Andrew
3
The article misses the major benefit of pre-school child care. It has nothing to do with women's careers. Rather, children form a sense of who they are between 18 and 36 months. It is important for this period to be spent around other children, so they learn how to interact and empathize with others.
In Sweden, parents get paid leave for the first 18 months of a child's life. Then, the child goes into pre-school from 18 months to age five. Then school and university, which are also publicly funded.
But pre-school is the most important for the development of good citizens. People need to have a good self-image, and pre-school creates that.
The benefits to women's careers is secondary.
61
@Herr Andersson my pre school age kids loved their daycare. And when they were in elementary school they pitied the kids who had to go home when class ended rather than go on to the after care which was engaging and fun. Sports, music, playing with otherkids, etc.
12
Why the focus on mothers? Men and women are both part of the equation of parenthood. Why do we continue to frame the conversation in a way that makes assumptions about the proper role for women AND men when it comes to parenthood? It is so tiresome for all involved. Many of us have evolved beyond these rigid ways of approaching family life and gender roles.
23
I see the issue from tge point of health insurance. For most people, it us tied to their full-time status at a particular job. If it was not the case, both partners could adjust working hours to meet the child's needs, in case affordable quality childcare is either not available or not desired. Instead, we are chained to our full-time jobs by health insurance, and oftentimes it means a mother has to drop out of workforce, thus losing her professional status and skills, so that her partner could maintain access to healthcare for the family.
9
@Oksana Definitely an argument for universal health care.
4
Of course it would tremendously benefit most Americans and improve the lives of families, but we won't get it for the same reason we don't have universal health care, affordable housing, or good public schools: this isn't an issue for the wealthy.
Why would our rulers care what's happening back in coach when first class is doing fine?
67
@SeattleGuy
And if the plane crashes, it will hardly matter which part of the plane you were sitting in. You're all hitting the ground together.
You're right: laws written by the rich to ignore everyone else who can work around the laws, anyway. But, so far, not the laws of physics.
4
There's evidence that mothers working outside the home provide a strong role model for children of both sexes. And honestly I don't know many families where the mother really has a choice. Our country talks about family values however when it comes to agreeing on a policy which is very much standard across the developed world, we don't put our money where our talk is.
46
This article is kinda right, kinda wrong. Why? Because the research is very slanted by the design of the studies...and this is why the research paints a distorted picture.
80% of us agree that M/W alike should be able to live and work as we see fit, and make a fair and comparable living.
80% of us see that greater parental involvement offers better outcomes for the kids most of the time.
80% of us agree that, while quality of interaction matters, as a parent there is ultimately no substitute for being there.
80% of us agree that a week is only 168 hours long, and it ends every 7 days.
80% of us agree that we shouldn't have to pay for someone else to have kids. Tough, but true if we're being honest. They're your kids, not mine.
80% of us agree we don't have sufficient means to live our preferred lifestyle without the income from work.
And - 80% of us would walk from our jobs tomorrow, if we won a Powerball 100MM jackpot.
Let me design the questionnaire, and I will get you data to support any conclusion you want, from the same sample group of over 2,000 people. They may not answer all the questions, but the data will support the outcome you prefer.
14
@Brian i agree with you 80 percent.
4
The still unanswered question is who stays home to take care of a child, when that child is ill (as inevitably happens) and therefore cannot or should not attend either school or day care?
Grandparents are not always available to step in.
I don't know how this is handled in other countries that claim to have solved this working-Mom problem, but would certainly like to read an informed article about how it is done.
8
@Penseur I found an article that may answer your question. It's about Sweden. Moms and dads (the whole family, actually) are entitled to so many benefits that deciding who stays home with a sick child must be the least of their worries. As you'll see in the last item, whoever stays home gets 80% of their salary.
When is the next flight there again?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/sweden.se/society/10-things-that-make-sweden-family-friendly/amp/
2
@Penseur i worked full time but deliberately chose a less interesting job because it happened to be a place that allowed sick days to care for dependents.
2
Working less than full time, for instance 3-4 days/week, for both parents would be more humane and equitable. As a pediatrician, I have known many capable and loving stay at home fathers as well as mothers. If one parent can, and chooses to stay home full time, then great. It just doesn’t have to be the mother
36
I thought I would work after my child was born, but when I saw what it took to take care of a baby, I couldn't bear the thought of turning the baby over to someone else. I wanted to keep my baby clean, well fed, happy. I didn't want to rely on someone who could not provide the love and attention I would.
24
I think that certainly part of the explanation is our ambivalence about having mothers entering the workforce instead of remaining at home. But I believe that the main issue is a financial one. High quality child care is expensive. Assuming that 15 million children were in child care and assuming a reasonable average cost of $20,000.00 per child per year (which would vary from city to city or location to location) that's about $300,000,000,000.00 per year. I suspect that most politicians and taxpayers take the view that this is simply too expensive.
6
@Schneiderman I would suggest that instead of subsidizing daycare--including for parents who can pay for it themselves---we support universal healthcare. Also a very expensive proposition that will be hard to implement. But *everyone* of every age will benefit from it. And some costs, such as prescription drug costs, can actually be brought down through negotiation. So the parents will have most of their medical costs paid for and can put more money toward paying for their own children's daycare. If we're going to push through a big government-supported benefit, let's benefit everyone, not just people who chose to have children even though children are expensive. No one chooses to become ill.
17
@Schneiderman
$20k/year? That’s a bit over $10/hour. At double that a family with two kids could hire an experienced private nanny to care for their children full time and be paying her well in all but the most expensive cities. Assuming an average of five kids per adult, including admin staff, and the cost of the facility I’d say perhaps $8k/year (about what it costs to educate a school age child) in a government run not for profit daycare.
3
@Frances Grimble
I don't disagree with you on the healthcare issue. But any savings on healthcare costs to almost all families would likely not nearly be enough to pay for reasonable childcare costs.
In the early 60's, while a bandsman at West Point (and a still difficult child), I was subjected to a Catholic priest opining strongly on the subject of woman's place in the home...and when I objected (equally strenuously), I was sent to KP for a week...either my fourth or fifth time.
I am truly disappointed to hear that that this matter has not been put to bed, as I thought it had, long before the dawning of the new century.
21
The matter is certainly not settled. There is no scientific proof that mothers must or must not work. I’m sure there are pros and cons of each. I’d like to know if there is a benefit of having one parent work at home versus both working. What if even subsidized child care was detrimental to some children, who may simply need more contact with a parent. Also, some mothers would choose not to work. I know older mothers who regret working instead of spending more time with clothier kids. Unfortunately, such a complex issue cannot be answered by ideologues who only think in black or white.
7
@Aaron Michelson
Agreed. And since from the article only 10% of current preschools are considered high quality, it’s not as though most people even have the opportunity to send their children to a good preschool. Suddenly having the government pay for it isn’t going to magically change that fact, unless there is basically unlimited funding.
2
The US needs women in the workplace to remain competitive and fill the job vacancies. US businesses would have to either import more help from overseas, outsource or automate even more, or risk having to pay men even more if women stayed home. The net result would be income inflation so that effectively they are paying for two workers but only getting one and currently without an Equal Pay Act in the US, they are getting the women to work harder and for less pay.
The other problem is US business doesn't want to have to pay for the care of the next generation of workers, that doesn't increase their own bottom line and maximising their shareholder value. So don't expect US business to support universal child care, universal health care or anything to the benefit of anyone other than their shareholders.
19
'Mother' does NOT = caregiver
Fathers are most definitely justas capable, just as much a parent..I was raised my a stay-at-home dad in the 1970's for heaven's sake.
So very tired of these antiquated assumptions that mothers are the only ones capable of looking after children, just because it's ore convenient for men.
51
"Mothers are more likely to use child care when it is cheaper and more available." It took a "research study" to arrive at that conclusion? That tells us something about the quality and significance of "research" in the social sciences.
14
@Jonathan Katz
Did you read the study?
The benefit of such research is to equip policymakers with data -- arrived at through expertise in the field and a well-designed, well-implemented study of a reliable sample size that can be generalizable to a larger population -- with which to defend their policy decisions.
Sure, it may have been an intuitive conclusion, but I certainly prefer that policymakers and legislators refer to rigorous, peer-reviewed research rather than just rely on their intuition when making decisions. Don't you? Or are you comfortable with your legislators and policymakers taking important decisions (like whether or not childcare is funded, where, and to what degree) because their guts already told them what to do, so why bother reading a bunch of boring research and stuff about it? Because facts are subjective...?
5
The missing factor in these discussions and calculations is the high cost of providing quality care. "Quality" means care-givers/teachers who are well trained, supported, supervised, and paid decent wages. It also means spaces that are well-designed, clean, and well-supplied with appropriate materials.
Any family that could pay the price might think that one parent staying home was simply a better deal.
23
@alternate thoughts
""Quality" means care-givers/teachers who are well trained, supported, supervised...Any family that could pay the price might think that one parent staying home was simply a better deal."
How many individual parents are well-trained, supported, supervised caregivers/teachers? From your description, a stay - at - home parent is practically child abuse.
...Andrew
2
Neither are Germans, and yet the daycare situation there is very different.
5
"At the same time, work for many Americans has become more inflexible and time-intensive, and part-time or flexible jobs can be hard to find. The result is a divided system, in which good child care is accessible only to affluent families"
This is the crux of the matter right here.
My spouse and I work full time and have two small kids. I want to be home more for them, but I don't want to give up working completely. the perfect balance, for ME, is working part-time. That way, I can still contribute financially and not miss out so much on my kids formative years. The downside is that employers don't offer benefits to part-time employees. If I don't work full-time I lose my healthcare etc.
I definitely don't blame any family that chooses to or has to have both parents work full-time. Both my parents worked full-time for a good while when I was a kid. but there are downsides to it as well. At the end of the day IMHO, parents just need more flexibility in the system. longer maternity leave, better affordable childcare, and flexibility in scheduling
34
If an employer is forced to allow male employees to have flexible work arrangements then they must too have the ability to ration the portion of their male staff who are eligible to procreate. While I would never suggest that a woman be told what to do with her body, the same rules do not apply to men. It just isn’t reasonable to offer all benefits to every employee. There has to be a line somewhere.
4
I don't buy it. The US is ranked close to the bottom in the world, in support for both maternity leave and child care.
When comparing against all those other countries (including my home of Canada), it's not ambivalence about mothers working outside the home that strikes me as the biggest difference.
But lack of universal health care -- there's a huge difference. If you can't support people when they're sick, why would you support them when they have babies?
80
Yes. Yes, women and men should work. If one parent can earn enough for the other parent to stay at home, and one parent WANTS to stay home, then that's great for that couple. But as a matter of policy, allowing both parents to work by providing high quality childcare is critical. It's good for the children, it's good for the parents, and it's good for the nation as a whole. It is a huge waste of potential for one half of the population to provide no intellectual or physical power towards the nation- if they're raising kids, they aren't doing research in a lab, inventing things, building infrastructure, or any of the numerous other things that people can do that benefit society as much or more than raising their small set of children.
Plus, let's be honest here. Housework and childcare is mind-numbingly, painfully boring and tedious. There are a lot rewards for raising children, but an awful lot of it is changing diapers, cleaning up vomit, being screamed at, reading the same book 293847598 times, and generally being cut off from adult interaction and intellectual stimulation. For years. I would never, ever give up my rewarding career to be a stay-at-home parent; it would break me. I know that some people enjoy being stay-at-home parents, and good for them. I don't. I like children well enough, and I love them dearly, but I do not want to care for them 24/7, not even my (hypothetical) own. And it is to society's benefit and my family's benefit to allow this.
75
@M
I stunned that someone would have the audacity to say that stay at home parents are ‘providing no intellectual or physical power towards the nation’. Would you say the same about those who work in child care facilities or schools?
My 15 years as a stay at home mom to our nine kids hasn’t been a waste just because I’m not using my college education by working in a lab or inventing things. I’m raising children. I’m providing care and love that no daycare worker can give them. Our now teens have expressed how lucky they feel to know that no matter what I’m always there to advise or help out when their friends have to leave messages on the voicemail at their parents office and hope for a call back.
They can hang out here with their friends after school because I’m home. If anyone gets sick or has a dentist appointment there’s no scrambling to find care or someone to cover at work. If my husband needs to go in early or take a deployment I’m home to keep everything running smoothly. I get errands, chores, laundry, and meal prep done during the day so our evenings and weekends are spent doing fun things as a family. Families we know with two working parents either spend their evenings and weekends doing all the household stuff. I have time to cook from scratch and be frugal in other ways which keeps our cost of living low for a family our size. Yes, many days are monotonous like you said but so are many jobs.
23
@M Raising children to be kind, capable, and moral members of society seems to be pretty important work, if you ask me. It’s hard to take your tone of authority seriously when it comes to the realities of at-home childcare when you seem to not have children of your own, referring to them as “hypothetical.” I’d urge you not to assume that what you expect would be your experience of parenting applies to everyone else. Don’t generalize from a particular, especially when it is hypothetical. Children are incredible blessings and sources of joy (despite the challenges), and many people enjoy being at home with them, forgoing other things for that opportunity, or wishing they had the chance to do so if it were feasible.
22
@M -wow. “It is a huge waste of potential for 1/2 of the population to provide no intellectual or physical power to the nation”
By leaving my long, lucrative career to stay at home and intellectually, spiritually, emotionally and physically nurture my children, I thought I was being of great service to the country and the world. The next generation is probably our greatest resource. I feel like I did my part in making sure that resource was as healthy and capable of reaching their potential, as possible.
12
If Americans “weren’t in agreement” about whether mothers of young children should work at all...... they would award them stipends to stay at home with their young. Since they don’t, it’s quite clear that’s most of the censure (directed at working mothers) is virtue signaling baloney.
26
@Fluffy -- I support such stipends *along* with support for parents purchasing childcare. In other words, I support an inclusive policy of supporting parents of young children whether or not they purchase childcare.
What an inclusive policy might look like: https://familyandhome.org/articles/campaign-inclusive-family-policies
Info on how many European countries give cash benefits to parents of young children: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/27/15388696/child-benefit-universal-cash-tax-credit-allowance
But notice that this article does *not* support the stipends you are suggesting, or a European model. It suggests using public money to relieve parents who purchase childcare from market forces which make such care expensive or difficult to find -- but suggests no help for parents who would like to stay home but need public money to help them do that.
And the question is -- why? The article makes clear that paid childcare is not the preference of many famillies. The author says people have conflicted feelings about whether government should make it easier for women to work outside the home. But those supporting assistance only for parents using paid childcare seem to have conflicted feelings about whether government should make it easier for parents who want to to stay home with their children. They rarely state that outright, and like this author they don't provide their rationale. All we see is a policy preference which suggests an unspoken bias.
5
@Fluffy People choose to have children and should research the costs before they plunge into this project. If they can't afford childcare by any method, they should not have the children.
3
Civilized countries subsidize high-quality childcare because healthy, happy people are the backbone of a healthy and strong society. They understand we are all part of a community and it's in everyone's interest to ensure children are well cared-for, nourished and protected, and that their families receive all of the social support they need.
In the US, we let people run daycare centers out of their homes without even making sure there are enough smoke detectors.
57
The smartest thing I ever did was go back to work 12 weeks after my kids were born. I was lucky with medical insurance and paid leave- I am still at the same company 19 years later and grateful for every year. Universal child care would allow more people to do what I did. Many at my daycare worked only to keep their medical. We treat families like parasites when they are tomorrow’s economy and as a result the US has fallen behind.
35
Perhaps your employer values your knowledge and ability enough to offer those benefits and more. But not all jobs are equal and neither are employees. You’ve earned what you’ve got. Many others have not.
3
I am an "alpha wife" -- and for this (among other) reasons, we didn't have kids. Since we rely on my income almost exclusively while my husband's work is to provide for our retirement needs, me staying home wasn't an option. Personally, I didn't see the point in having children only to turn them over to someone else to raise, even if that "someone" was their father. I wanted to be the one raising my children.
I think this story glosses over the reality that what many women want is to stay home and raise their families. Too many women continue working for pay because that money is needed to meet or provide some stability for family finances. For them, having child care available just enables them to remain wage slaves, with their kids raised by day care workers.
20
@JM
You make an excellent point. I can’t count the number of times someone has commented on how they wished they could stay home but don’t because they need the extra $100/week they’re left with after paying for daycare or they didn’t want to have to start their career over. Maybe part time and/or from home work could be a partial solution?
3
I think you are correct that this is how many women feel. They want to be queen of the castle, ideally. I get kind of tired of that rigid viewpoint, myself. Men can be good parents, too. You are an alpha and may think your way is the best/only way, but I doubt that’s true. There’s a middle way for couples who are able to share and compromise.
6
@JM judgmental attitudes like this are why this country has a crippling inability to solve our many problems.
3
One of several reasons why I have decided not to have children.
9
What about the single mothers out there? The American people who were polled in the Pew Poll are clearly out of touch.
10
Depending on how old and well educated that single mother is, it would be better to discourage her from becoming pregnant.
3
SMH. Everybody needs to go read the articles in the 1619 slavery series.
12
Indeed.
Capitalism does not give a fig for your skin color or level of pigmentation- if you lack capital- you are a loser and open to whatever exploitation your employer wishes to level on you.
6
Husbands should work and wives should raise children....
5
.....is an incredibly outdated, and very chauvinistic point of view.
Men and women are BOTH parents, both intelligent human beings of equal worth. Welcome to the 21st century, darling.
10
@simmons I had no idea you could read the online NYTimes in the 19th century!
8
Caring for children as a parent is a "vocation" and requires many high level skills and sacrifices. It is galling that the concept of "working parent" presumes the "work" is done for pay outside the home. The cost of parenthood is too high for many today and fewer women will opt to marry and have children. The changes to our society will have long term repercussions as the value of current and future generations is diminished. The Democrats should put the issues of working families front and center and value the contributions - paid and unpaid - of all family members. If family is the bedrock of society we are doing a lousy job of honoring all our citizens.
19
It is perfectly acceptable to have a full-time nanny. What's is the matter with these poor folks? They just don't have their values in the proper place. Hire a nanny and give her some cake. If you need welfare then you shouldn't have any children, because poor people have bad genes that we don't want passed on anyway. Then again, where would we be without rape and incest? We truly have lost our minds .... souls long gone.
16
"Why the U.S. Has Long Resisted Universal Child Care" It seems like we have no trouble embracing universal war, which makes me think there is something wrong with our value system.
43
I believe people should work. But with massive overpopulation fueling deadly climate change, I don't believe governments should encourage people to have children.
10
If we don't offer childcare because of the "moral" argument that a parent should stay home, why are we also the only developed country with no paid parental leave? There are no morals under American capitalism.
58
@Chris You win the comment section.
4
It truly is a divided system. I have friends where the couple's combined income is in the high six figures, and while she was on maternity leave, they hired something called a night nanny who would sit up with the newborn all night so they could get some sleep. This a great concept, but a luxury most probably can't afford in this day and age.
6
In 1972, at the height of the second-wave feminist movement, there was bipartisan support in Congress behind this bill to provide universally-available, subsidized, quality child care. When Nixon vetoed it, he openly said the federal government shouldn't encourage women to work instead of taking care of their own babies.
However you may personally feel about that, the fact is that the anti-daycare forces, like Phyllis Schlafly, didn't anticipate that, over the next almost two decades, women were forced to go to work, whether they wanted to or not, because it became impossible for middle class families to make ends meet on a single income. The decline of the union movement under Reagan took away advocates for workers, and companies stopped giving raises.
It is very often remarked that working class men's incomes didn't rise, when accounting for inflation, for the next forty years. So, women HAD to work to achieve the living standard that middle class families had come to expect.
We women of course feel ambivalent about day care for very young children ; I did. But that ambivalence is salved when quality day care is supported by generous federal entitlements when working families cannot afford it. They have this in Finland. We almost had it. Meredith
27
Part of the problem is low wages, which results in both parents having to work just to survive. But of-course the GOP is against that also.
26
It is bizarre that Ms Miller would claim that women in this country want to stay at home, and don't want careers. It is bizarre to claim that there is still a debate in this country whether it is desirable that women remain barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, rather than fulfilling their aspirations in the workplace, in universities, in the arts.
As affordable and high-quality child care is made available, more women work. That's the case in America and around the world.
Americans are cont conflicted as to whether women have worth outside of the home, regardless of what The Upshot claims.
15
@Sean. I don’t think the issue is as binary as you perceive it to be. I’m a mother with an advanced professional degree who has always worked and I’ve asked myself many times whether my career success was worth the sacrifice. Frankly, I would’ve been a good at home parent and, for the record, that’s a tough, tough job. I had no desire to have my little ones in daycare and still don’t believe daycare is optimal.
16
@Semper Liberi Montani I think daycare is quite optimal. It allows children to become acclimated to different caregivers, learn in different ways, try all sorts of new things that any one individual home can't provide. Daycare and preschool are wonderful, glorious things that should be celebrated, not seen as less-than or non-ideal.
20
@Sean "Barefoot and pregnant"? What a rude and judgmental comment. This is exactly the type of misogyny we should move away from as a society. There are highly educated, intelligent, capable women who make a conscious choice to stay at home and raise their children even though they could easily make hundreds of thousands of dollars working outside the home.
19
This article makes it seem that staying home with children doesn’t involve work. If looking after babies and toddlers all day (and night) wasn’t such hard work perhaps it wouldn’t be so expensive to find someone to do it well. It is work, extremely hard work to do it well - I know many women who openly admit they prefer their paying jobs to being with their small children. It is work that has almost no value in our society (monetary, status, experience) unless you are earning money looking after someone else’s children.
64
@Allison I so agree.l I am tired of correcting people about the terminology and the underlying attitude that SAHP's do not "work".
16
@Allison,
Well, I find the concept that if you work, then someone else is raising your children, ludicrous. I worked as a single mother, both outside the home, for pay, so we could afford a place to live, food to eat, and clothes to wear, AND inside the home, taking care of our place to live, preparing our food, and laundering those clothes. All the while taking care of my kid.
Women work both IN and OUT of the home. And both situations are undervalued and underpaid, because, you know, women are the ones doing the work.
38
@ Dr. J,
If you work outside the home, it obviously does not mean someone else is “raising” your children, but while you are at your paying job, it is physically impossible for you to also be doing the work associated with caring for small children. And yes, it’s very tedium is partly what makes it work (cleaning up their constant mess, reading the same board book for the 100th time, constantly coming up with stimulating activities, remaining calm and patient during inevitable meltdowns etc etc.)
3
I’m a new mother. By the measure of things, my family is pretty comfortable. If we pinched our pennies and had no bad luck, my husband’s job could cover our expenses, which is a rarity. However, my job provides excellent health insurance and a safeguard against unforeseen unemployment or other emergency expenses. It just covers the high cost of infant childcare.
As a millennial, I grew up seeing workers laid off or forced out of “stable” jobs. I would be scared to have my family on a single income without my job being protected- work has become too precarious, and the cost of necessities (especially housing and healthcare) have become too high to put your eggs in one basket.
I desperately wish I could stay home with my baby until she was a year old- or even six months. I would gladly return to work after that. But instead, I came back to my job at the end of my 12 week unpaid FMLA leave to provide financial stability. I love my job, but she still feels so young. Expanded parental leave to provide infant care would ease the emotional and financial burden of daycare. Toddler care is much cheaper, and the children (and parents) get more out of it.
159
@Newmom,
Read “The Two Income Trap” by Elizabeth Warren.
I read it, as a working single parent.
And when my daughter was born, I had to cobble together 6 weeks of leave. Then, because she became desperately ill, I asked for 6 more weeks — which was given, grudgingly, with no salary and the requirement to pay for COBRA to continue with our health insurance, which we obviously needed. At least I had a job to return to.
But even my story pales in comparison to many, many others. We need to band together to require decent leave for new parents, and then high quality, accessible, and affordable — preferably free and public — child care for every child.
53
I teach grade two. I honestly cannot tell any noticeable difference between families where Mom (or a parent) stays home and families where both parents work. I don’t think it makes any real difference.
115
@Damhnaid - yes!
Raised by a stay at home Dad and daycare my entire childhood-- still turned out healthy, balanced, skipped grades in school and have a graduate degree. Still adore my parents.
Happy, secure family is all that is necessary to ensuring a child feels loved and appreciated. An unhappy parent forced to stay home is not a benefit to anyone.
24
When women stay home to take care of children they lose their voice in society. "Traditional" values means women are silent and society is arranged by and for men. This hurts both women and children. It may seem like children benefit in the short time by more parent time, but they lose in the long term when society and its laws doesn't care about their needs nor those of their primary caregivers.
160
@Me I don't see that a woman staying at home with children means she loses her voice. She can still vote, she can still join political causes, she can still express her opinions, on the net and elsewhere. I am not advocating "traditional values" here, which in any case are an illusion. There have always been working-class women and they have always worked. Even in the US in the 1950s. I am just saying that choosing to have children and then stay at home with them does not mean a woman loses her voice in any way.
11
How does having a typical job - say, a service job, or a boring desk job - give anyone “a voice”? In a democracy, our “voice” is our vote, and SAHM’s can vote like anybody else. Also, many (most?) SAHM’s are responsible for how their family’s money is budgeted and spent. They may not bring in money, but they have the main say (with their “voice”) about where it goes.
3
Perhaps the laudable goal would be if mothers could afford to stay home for just a little time, maybe the first three years. Perhaps so-called “baby bonuses” might help.
~
If mothers want to work, that’s great. There are some very high energy ladies; and other women whose own mothers (the grandmas) are falling all over themselves to provide childcare. What I find sad, though, is that so many mothers want to stay home, but can’t.
A lot of mothers work. But amongst married mothers of kids under six, about a third stay home, a third work part time (often very few hours) and only a third work full time. I hate how modern — often feminist — thinkers act like all women either need or want to work, and it’s just a fact of life. No, it’s not. A lot of people really don’t want public daycare.
We had this fight in Ontario a few years ago. Some of the people who objected to subsided daycare were not just stay at home moms, but anyone who used a nanny, too, or had a relative caring for their child. The gov had success finally passing a year long mat leave which is subsidized. It’s great for employers and entry level workers alike because there are all these one year contact fill-in jobs available.
About daycare — check out Quebec. They went with cheap subsidized daycare and the results have not been good.
19
@C I beg to differ, a close friend of mine had 2 kids in subsidized daycare up until recently and it was a great daycare. And a few other friends as well prior to her. Subsidized daycare in Quebec is actually quite successful.
10
@C
Feminism is about choice and supporting women choosing what is best for them and their families and access to affordable daycare allows families to do that.
17
@C,
But we have free public education. Do you think that should be abolished, and women who want to should stay home and educate their children at home? Maybe it should be abolished because some parents — mostly mothers, from what I’ve read — do stay home and educate their children, and don’t want free public education?
5
Another consideration not mentioned elsewhere in Comments: Sometimes both parents continue to work while raising children because their skills or knowledge would become obsolete if either one took more than a few months off, making them unemployable in their respective fields. Their choices therefore are: not to have children in the first place; to put their child/children in daycare; or, if economically possible, for one of them to leave their chosen occupation for something less suited to their talents in order to stay home with a child/children during their formative years.
33
@Cassandra
It's the difference between a career and a series of jobs.
9
"Should mothers even work?" NYT actually shared that ludicrous question? Yes, mothers that want to work should work. Father's that want to work should work. I was born in the 1950s. My mother worked. I (and my siblings) grew up to be well-adjusted and well-educated (3 Ph.Ds, well beyond my parent's educational levels). I have 2 children and I worked and lo and behold, they both grew up to be well-adjusted, well-educated, working parents. Both are married with children now. One is finishing her Ph.D and going on the job market as I finish it. Should mothers even work indeed!
27
As a working mother, I can't believe we even still debate this question. I once had a mom at Girl Scouts say to me, "it must be fun to work instead of taking care of your child". To which I replied in front of a room of women "I work to put a roof over my child's head and food on the table." That was 17 years ago and I just divorced a man who sat home and played video games. Very few mothers work for selfish reasons. It is to help their family.
70
@Virginia
What would be a “selfish” reason to work?
10
@Anon - You've got me there. I can't think of one, but I did hear many woman back then say that woman who worked were selfish and didn't care enough to raise their children. I was fortunate that my mother watched my daughter because I couldn't count on my ex-husband to remember to do so. And by high school, my daughter took care of her grandmother each afternoon. P.S. Like so many children who had working parents, she turned out very well. My daughter even cooks dinner for me many nights.
10
I can't believe this is still being discussed in 2019.
56
What's the point of more academic studies when those with power ignore reality so.
9
The US has resisted universal child care because our elected officials would rather pay for missiles and bombs.
The one working parent, two parent household is a thing of the past. In todays economy you cannot achieve a middle class lifestyle without both parents working.
And the data tells us the fastest growing segment of American family life is single white women who decide to have a child outside of marriage.
Yet we cling to myths about American family and economic life. In France, they not only have universal child care, but significant parental leave and universal pre-k. All public schools are free all the way through university.
We need to explode these myths and tell our elected officials that you could probably fund all of universal child care for the 13 billion dollars we have budgeted for the next nuclear aircraft carrier.
53
"Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, earlier this year decried what he called the belief that “'it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids.'”
That, from a man who devotes his life to one of the most soulless corporations anywhere.
It's not about virtue, Tucker. Sometimes it's about necessity. And by the way, you ought to get out of the studio a bit more. Not everyone who works works for a corporation.
79
I think we all would be better off if Tucker Carlson would have stayed home taking care of his children instead of working for a soulless corporation like Fox News.
413
Hate to break it to you-all, but "Americans" are still terribly, terribly concerned about women functioning outside of the limits established by the Victorian middle class. In a great many parts of the country it might as well still be 1880 where the only women who worked were servants and the occasional governess.
29
@GWPDA In the Victorian era, thousands of women were working in factories, on farms, as store clerks, and in many other jobs. And they had children. Not everyone has always been middle or upper class.
9
@Frances Grimble - Yes, but they weren't really 'respectable'. And that has codified the presumed norms and rules. All those farmwives, all those type writers, those bank clerks - shocking in their defiance of what was 'right.' Alas.
3
@GWPDA I was a history major, and studied the Victorian era. And I grew up as a middle-class kid in a working-class rural area. It has always been respectable--and expected--for working-class women to work. Indeed, in the 1950s and 1960s many middle-class women worked, but they were mostly confined to "feminine" jobs such as teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. My mother worked as a university professor. Also, if the husband ran any kind of small business, the wife often did the secretarial work and bookkeeping. If he were a doctor in private practice (as most were then), or a dentist, the wife often ran the front office. Farming was considered a working-class occupation, and farm wives may have worked the hardest of all. They had to take care of livestock, keep up the home vegetable garden, do lots of canning and preserving of fruits and vegetables, and often, ran a roadside stand selling some vegetables, fruit, and eggs. (Yes eggs, unrefrigerated and in summer. My parents often bought from the neighbors' vegetable stands.) And on top of this, women were doing all the housework, cooking, and childcare. Hard work, but by no means "rebellious."
6
You set up a false numbers argument -- by citing stats that apply to "children" (under 18) when the relevant dispute is over group care for BABIES. Nobody gives a hoot if both parents work and the kid is 15... It's the 15 month olds we need to worry about.
Also: the dispute is not "do women belong in the workplace?" but rather "do tiny babies belong in group care?" If we frame daycare in terms of women and their needs we'll keep shafting babies. Babies have developmental needs and they are best met in dyadic care.
PLEASE differentiate between kids and babies. Please. It's a terribly important distinction.
Not recognizing the reality of babies developmental needs is a modern cultural blindspot. Lack of intimate dyadic care contributes to rising anxiety and depression among the young.
27
Most here talk of college “children”- they think their children are still babies into their 30’s!
That is one expensive pet!
The children of the poor are more useful citizens and don’t all have anxiety disorder- or if they do- they must get on with their lives anyway.
Maybe the wealthy should stop waiting till their 40’s to have children?
They’d see a steep decline in autism and cognitive health disorders in their offspring if they didn’t wait til their eggs were old and their sperm (over 35) has important gaps in the DNA sequencing.
Having children is for the young.
Go back to nature.
And who gives a fig who stays home?-
But someone should.
To, you know, make it a home?
And wages should rise to reflect an ability for a single earner to support a family again. That’s what is needed.
4
@Megan
'Daycare' needn't mean low paid workers lining up toddlers in front of a TV. It could mean a Montessori program with certified teachers, stimulating child directed learning and interaction with other children.
My mother (of five) stayed home and hated it. She certainly didn't engage in 'developmental' activities with any of us.
4
New moms--and dads--should get a year of paid maternity leave. Many civilized countries already do this. The US does not. Why not? Oh, right. GREED! How silly of me to ask.
26
@Cody McCall
ANd who does their work while they are off playing with the kiddo?
Oh right their co-workers have to pick up the slack
And who pays for their leave?
The rest of us aren't interested in picking up the tab. Forget about - unless they want to pay for my healthcare costs, mortgage and/or other stuff
7
@AnnS Instead of purposely not finding common ground how about attempting it? Allow new parents to work from home for a year. There, fixed it.
Oh, I don't know. When one of our colleagues left for a year to finish off a pesky Ph.D, the rest of us picked up one of her classes and got paid extra to do so.
Win-win?
Obviously, it depends on the job, but some of us might not find extra work burdensome.
3
Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, earlier this year decried what he called the belief that “it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids.”
If that's how Tucker feels, why is he working for Fox News?!
Oh, right. He meant that to apply only to women... But if it's true for us, it's true for men as well. That makes possible solutions a bit more complex that simply keeping life painful for women working outside the home, doesn't it!
21
Maybe I missed it, but was there any recognition that mothers are forced to work to help support their families? Most unions have been busted and corporations need to reduce their huge profits and pay workers a living wage........However, there are other compelling reasons for women to work, unless you buy into the right-wing notion of women as only breeders. If the right cares so much about families, as they proclaim, they would fund universal child care - with competent, well-paid workers, instead of leaving a lot of kids with sub-standard care.
25
This brings to mind how very negative views of welfare and of people of color were fostered or ratcheted up.
When overall earnings dropped and more families had both parents working, at least part-time, more resentment was fostered toward women of color who weren't married or whose husbands had a relatively low paying job. These families were making less and needing more financial help. Reagan's welfare queen diatribes further fanned the flames of bigotry. Before this, most women were home with their children, especially pre-schoolers. But with more women working, it was easy to look down at those receiving welfare benefits and not working, especially if this seemed to confirm any prejudices we held.
When welfare benefits were cut in 1996, more women in some degree of poverty had abortions; they couldn't see their way to having a child--or another child. Such a mess, that is far from adequately and humanely dealt with.
6
So we raise our daughters to aspire to a fulfilling career and then they study, sacrifice and worked their butts off through primary, middle, high school, undergrad, grad school only to expect them to abandon it all if they get pregnant? Ridiculous. Motherhood is a relationship and doesn’t have to be a vocation (unless one is so inclined) and it is possible to have a job and still be a great mother, just like you can work and be a great dad. I wonder how many people who think having the mother at home is ideal have met all the women trapped in abusive marriages because they have no earning potential or known any of the intelligent women who have seen the dreams they had for themselves die and now live a shadow life numbed by pills or alcohol.
144
In both recent times, especially and in some things like income and wealth inequality going back 50 years, America is a backward and now rapidly un-developing nation.
It's just that it comes as a shocking surprise that we are now so very backward to those of us over 65.
Mothers must not work? Rape and incest are responsible for keeping our species alive? There is no man-made climate change? The statue of Liberty mentions that you should only come here if you got the do-ray-me?. The Clintons run a criminal gang the FBI never stops trailing? There aren't a hundred or so Republicans found to have been in touch with Russians tied to Putin? Trump hasn't told almost 11 thousand lies?
26
I guess this is yet another example of American “exceptionalism”?
7
"Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, earlier this year decried what he called the belief that “it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids.”
Perhaps Mr. Carlson is announcing his decision to leave the "soulless corporation" for which he has been working to stay home and raise his own kids.
26
Same with healthcare. Employers don’t want Universal Healthcare bc then we can walk off the job when we tire of their greed. If employers wanted it off their payroll it’d be fine by now.
11
Ward and June are dead. Wally and the Beav are nearing retirement, and Eddie Haskell is in the White House...the country isn’t going back to the 1950’s, but you can keep praying and believing it’s still possible.
14
I did not see a mention on Focus on the Famiky, or the religious right involvement with their agenda for all American families and women. Where do you think these beliefs are seeded?
11
"Americans still aren't in agreement that mothers should work at all". BUT THEY DO!
9
More "I want ABC" & " I want someone else to pay for it"....sigh
The demands seem to be (1) high quality care & (2) affordable care
Well you can't have both.
High quality will not be affordable if the childcare provider (degree & trained for it) wants to live indoors & have a middle income life. In my county it takes MINIMUM a $51,000 household income to live indoors -- renting takes about $59,000.
Childcare staff wages are 1/3rd -1/2 the cost of the service. If one worker cares for 5 kids, then multiply $59000 by 2.5 and divide by 5. That means $29500 PER year PER kid .
High quality -yes. Affordable - no
It gets more "affordable" if you cut the worker wages to a pittance - national average is $22,126 ($10.64/hour). Now it won't be high quality as the cost of training & education for the worker are prohibitive on that pay - McDonald's pays better.
The arguments for making the rest of us pay for your daycare (SUBSIDIES!) are
* better for your kid
* better for you so you can make money &/or earn pension/Social Sec credits &/or stay in the workforce without ending on a "mommy track"
Gimme gimme - it never ends
Your kids are not a rare thing - world has an EXCESS of people. What is good for them is not my problem
I resent the idea that YOU want access to my bank account so you can work. You are not my problem. I don't care that you want something
Now if you want to pay all my health insurance premiums, deductibles & copays then we can talk a trade
3
@AnnS So when you're lying in a hospital bed - who is going to be your surgeon? Your nurse? Who is cooking your meals? Who is going to empty your bed pan in the nursing home? You pays for the roads you drive on? Do you pay for them all yourself? How about that health insurance? Take meds? Who developed those meds? Did you pay for that basic research all by your lonesome? And finally - you appear to have some real deep seated anger at women who have kids (and work?) maybe just mothers in general. But, your mental health is not my problem.
17
@AnnS Actually having more people in the workforce is better for society. When more people are earning, spending and paying taxes we all benefit.
8
@AnnS I certainly think government-subsidized childcare should be subjected to a means test. If the parent is single, working minimum wage, struggling just to get by, then maybe yes. If there are two parents and they can afford to pay for daycare but just want the extra cash from not paying for it--then no.
3
Poor women have always worked, rich women have always had paid child care help.
What is being “outsourced” by middle class parents is not parenting but the alloparenting that used to be done by grandma or Aunt Suzy when people lived closer to extended family.
10
Apart from a few ladies who lunch types, all mothers work. A lot. Hard. Nobody objects to mothers working, as long as they don't get paid for it.
46
I read this article and see women in red dresses and white head gear, wives in blue dresses and men telling them what to do. Margaret Atwood was closer to the truth than even she may know.
18
With the world facing over population and people of color fleeing the tropics why would the government encourage breeders (to use a 60’s term)
3
What surprises me is the fact that raising a child and doing house chores is not consider work and is not remunerated. Why do we pay for childcare and housework then when we do not want to do it. Beats me!!
11
It's not that housework and child care are not real work. It's just that no one gets paid for working around their own house, including lawn care and handyperson jobs as well.
2
Perhaps the stay-at-home caregiver of a child, parent, family member could be credited with earning a certain monthly wage for Social Security purposes, so she's not left high and dry when she's 65 or 72 and has nothing but a minimum monthly SS.
Also, perhaps public grade schools could offer child care to toddlers, partially subsidized by the government(s) -- local, state, and federal -- and partially paid for, on a sliding scale based on income, by the parents.
24
@Katrin Yes, and SAHP's should be valued for their work experience as parents, caregivers, logistics planners, tutors, psychologists, multi-taskers, problem-solvers, leaders, community builders, managers, volunteers, teachers, nutrition providers... the list goes on and on. I have never ever been asked during any of my job interviews or at social events, ""So, what did you learn as a SAHP? What challenges did you have? What problems did you solve? How did you develop?"
4
For most families it is a matter of having the ability to pay for food, clothes, housing, etc. It’s hard to be a good mother and raise your children at home when you can’t afford one.
15
“it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids.”
It boggles the mind, smacks the gob! Tucker Carlson - who works for the ultimate Soulless Corporation, who makes a living by bloviating his Perpetual Nonsense - has the gall, the chutzpah, to criticize working women with that statement, apparently w/o irony or shame! Sheesh!
The reason we don't have universal childcare in The Land of The Free (old, rich, white men) is because Carlson's Soulless (R)egressives only care about kids between conception and birth, as has often be said.
"After yer' born, kid, pull yerself up by yer own bootie straps, ya' lazy, freeloading Taker!"
49
This essay is highly misleading. It mentions the percentage of people saying it's best for one parent to stay home. But it doesn't mention for children of what age? new infants? Two year-olds? When the children are in middle school and high school?
Let's see the survey results asking young women if they believe their place is in the home, and if they believe that working outside the home for married women is wrong? I"m guessing that overwhelmingly women will say that their place is not barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, which is what The Upshot is trying to imply.
Women who have access to high-quality, low-cost child care overwhelmingly decide to work outside the home. And that is true in America, and everywhere else in the developed world.
The argument is not moral; that was dispensed with decades ago. The argument is economic: business owners don't want to have a percentage of their profits paid into child care. It's much cheaper to discard women workers when they have children.
Every woman in the developed world has the right to paid family leave and high-quality child care. And that is what the overwhelming majority of families in America want as well, regardless of the cherry=picked sources printed here.
19
Societal blindness to reality ... what is a single mother to do? Or a single father? And why are the realities of American family composition and economics ignored by so many policy makers ... ignorance or misogyny?
Because we do know, don't we, that the two-parent family with one wage-earner able to support a spouse and 2.5 children is pretty much a thing of the past once you consider low wages, student debt and the economic stagnation of the middle class? And that supporting a family and having adequate time for enriched and engaged parent-directed child-rearing are pretty tough for most wage-earners, no matter how many parents there are in a family ...
11
The child care bill which was proposed in 1971 and won wide bi-partisan support was drafted by Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug.
13
"I have voted Democrat for 60 years but I am greatly concerned that the current candidates’ competing among each other to see who can offer the biggest package of free everything for everyone will lead to Trump’s re-election in 2020."
- Mon Ray, KS
Amen...
3
I think there should be a fee or tax on air. Think of all those lousy freeloaders breathing free air! It just galls me.
11
Let’s not forget to take into account the cost to mental health of mothers who stay home and then, of course , the mental health of her children for having a mother who is less than happy or fulfilled.
16
@phoebe
ANd the rest of us are NOT interested in paying the bill for daycare so the mommy can be 'happy' or 'fulfilled'
3
@phoebe not all stay-at-home mothers incur costs to their mental health, not to discount in any way those who do. Some (many, even) women are happier to be at home, even if it is hard for others to believe. I speak from first-hand experience, as someone who has struggled with anxiety for nearly 15 years.
2
@AnnS
Speak for yourself; there are many taxpayers who are supportive of subsidized daycare for any number of reasons - including to help mothers self-actualize because self-actualized human beings are better parents, better neighbors, better citizens.
6
Do you mean work outside the home, or work for a wage? Because if you are a mother, you work.
37
I was flabbergasted to read the following sentence in this article:
“One-third of Democrats surveyed by Pew Research Center said it was ideal for one parent to stay home.”
Why on earth would anyone bother to report such skewed data without further analysis? Did Republicans surveyed by Pew have a different response? How about independents? Is this article meant to be read only by Democrats? Is the author reporting or lobbying or is this the new journalism?
This article would also have benefited of from thoughtful examination of the available data on workforce/child care participation of women who are on various forms of welfare, including white women who, by the way, outnumber blacks as welfare recipients.
There are also variations in workforce participation (and therefore need for child care) according to whether families are single-parent vs two-parent, discussion of which would have helped readers understand a very complex topic.
I believe there is a strong case to be made for making child care more widely available, but this article doesn’t do it.
1
The United States is a primitive plutocracy. It attracts greedy capitalists from around the world who perpetuate the plutocracy and perpetuate the suffering of most of the population. Every time progressives try to elect politicians who will actually do good things for the country and bring it into the company of civilised nations, the right-wing and neoliberal drum beat begins: 'Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren can't win in this country! Give it up! Only Steve Statusquo can beat Marty Mouthfoam! And pay your medical bills-get five jobs if you have to!! And take care of your kids! You neglected them by working five jobs, that's why they went into Walmart and shot job-snatching Mexicans! Not our precious guns!
Those who voted for Ronald Reagan sent the country straight down the highway to Hell. And I don't mean Michigan.
19
Having a job that pays $ 11.48 hr I can not afford it
I noted in Ms. Mei's post
"If childcare were more affordable, I’d do that schedule forever. (For example, if it were like my friend in Germany who paid less than $100/month for her kids.) "
So there is a solution in Germany
But to implement it here would require that other Americans, with their taxes, are willing to subsidize it.
That is not US culture
14
A traditional nuclear family has a father who provides protection and the basic necessities for sustenance and a mother that provides nurturing and instills values (and, yes, the lines can and do overlap). In modern America, though, the father is often absent most of the time or missing altogether, and the mother is away at work most of the day. Child rearing is left to non-relatives, and even during "family time" to television and the internet. Still, we are surprised when we see society crumbling around us and refuse to admit the primary reason.
4
@Dan Bruce Good childcare is just that, whether it is provided by a parent or trained workers in. Even you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between adults from good childcare inside and outside the home. The answer is to provide good childcare someplace, in public schools, at the workplace, someplace rather than to transport us all to the 1950s.
13
This article states child care in America has customarily been "rooted in moral argument." This may have been so in past generations but it hasn't been a valid premise for some 50 years now. A two income family has become an economic necessity. Too many who would choose to be a stay at home parent are unable to do that because they need the money. In the latter half of the 20th century women's liberation movements produced spokespeople that showcased the lives of professional women. Particularly those working in professions traditionally dominated by men. This was a good thing but it served to have a fall out effect. Working class women encouraged to work outside the home. This revised consciousness brought about two general conditions. More women working in the professions who are able to afford prime quality child care. And working class women taking jobs outside the home not out of choice but necessity with child care options compromised by income restrictions.
6
For working class families traditional child care is incredibly expensive. Many rely on their neighbors, grandparents, aunts or an illegal day care in someone's home. For those Moms or Dads that can afford to stay at home with their children fine. However the majority need two incomes. There is plenty of data that portrays a structured daycare as a head start academically with life long advantages...the key is how to fund and supervise. I do not agree with the presmise of this article that it is a moral question that prohibits its development rather it is political and also a failure of policy presentation. The local property tax which is the primary funding mechanism for public schools is a very unpopular taxing scheme. However there is a need and a demand we just need political leadership and a progressive way to fund.
9
The fact that universal, high quality, subsidized child care works is exactly why there is resistance from well off Americans to providing it. As the article says:
"The children who went to these centers, particularly from low-income families, performed better educationally and economically throughout their lives..."
The our society is a hierarchical ecosystem. Those who are able to provide their children intense preparation and indoctrination enable those fortunate kids to claim the limited number of jobs with high financial rewards and social status. The necessary social and academic habits must be taught beginning at birth.
Waiting until children reach college to provide remedial classes, well intentioned affirmative action, and financial aid is often insufficient to over come the skill deficit from a childhood without the intellectual enrichment of high quality child care, tutoring, and the guidance of experienced, goal oriented adults and being surrounded by such peers and adults.
Privileged people recognize that providing such advantages to all children will create a larger pool of successful children who will compete with their own for limited slots in high quality colleges and careers. So, instead of providing the tools that would actually help the children of the poor, the elite focus on virtue signaling, then send their kids to private schools and shower them with advantages to be sure they attain greater "merit" than those that cannot afford it.
58
Best comment of the day!
3
When we got married in 1973 we intended to start a family, but after a couple of years realized what a huge economic risk that was becoming. The cherished model of Mom-at-home (with canine siblings) we Baby Boomers enjoyed was already past. I never felt boxed out of the workplace; when was work ever an option once Capitalism trended ever greedier? Rather, we felt boxed out of raising a family, and reasoned we could adopt later if we prospered and that became feasible. We guessed right, and witnessed the post-Reagan economic system shatter the middle class. Our siblings all raised latchkey kids and seem to resent that we got to retire, and that they may never have grandkids.
19
I found it interesting that nowhere in this article was the topic of health care. I am a woman who has worked her entire adult life, even while raising two children. While I've made more money than my husband for many years, what has rooted me in the workforce is the requirement that one of us provide healthcare benefits for our family. That has been my responsibility.
My husband has worked for several different employers over the years and none of them have provided health care or what we would call affordable healthcare.
Please don't forget that while working for money is one tie to a job, working for health care benefits is another, and often they carry equal importance to a family. Many women who work shoulder the healthcare benefits responsibility as well as breadwinner.
248
@Brook Trout Whisperer. Exactly. I am not the higher-earner in my family, but healthcare is more affordable through my employer. If I don't work full-time then i don't have healthcare. I wish that there were an option to obtain healthcare with part-time work, or that healthcare was not tied so completely to employment.
27
In France preschool care is free and obligatory from age 3. Children must also be vaccinated to enter. Many parents organize kindergarten and preschool through cooperatives. Great attention everywhere is given the meals with impressive menus framed for all passers by to read from the streetwith of course the special French choreography as for the composition of a meal with a piece of cheese - a new cheese every day of course- at the end of it. I have heard three year olds seriously discuss the difference between a camembert and a brie de Maux. Children are taught to drink water. No sodas ever. Such a well organised child care means that French mothers can work and do so happily. And by the way the manners of French children are impeccable.
97
@suedoise, but apparently french children stay home for the first three years under the system you describe. The first three years of life are critical in terms of foundational brain development, as well as physical and emotional development. If that critical foundation is laid, then you can safely entrust the child to more institutional care at age 3. What I was worried about with my own children was their first 3 years. I stayed home during that time to make sure they got what I wanted them to have, best provided by their parent, imho. Unfortunately, there are some parents who are not in a position to provide all, or even a significant portion of the required foundational care for the first three years. What do they do in France? How do they pay for it? The parents who are lacking the resources probably can’t pay for an alternative, so what happens to them? The well-equipped parents stay home for three years or pay for a good alternative. The poorly equipped french parents stay home being inadequate and lacking alternatives. Just like in the US.
9
@Ann No, there is an extensive daycare system for infants -- with far longer opening hours than what we have in the US. That's why so many French women work, even though their maternity leaves are "only" three months long.
13
As part of an optional national service program, include childcare as one kind of duty station (overseen by experienced childcare professionals as managers of course).
16
@D.E. Awesome idea!
4
Thank you, Ms. Cain. An important part of the controversy over abortion involves the same issue; a feeling that women should be busy having and taking care of, children, and that they should have no choice in the matter. This belief helps to explain why many people in the anti-abortion movement want to define all forms of birth control as "abortion".
37
If the expectation is that one parent stays home for the first few years (95% this is a mother) then it creates an environment where ALL women are taken less seriously in the workforce.
Why invest in her, she'll just leave when she has kids.
Why promote her when this guy has been with us for 10 uninterrupted years?
Why not gives her the layoff, she can just go spend time with her grandkids.
That's how it had been and women have had to claw their way into higher positions because of the assumption that women belong at home with children.
That's where we'll go again if the support is for families to afford one parent at home as opposed to reasonable work schedules (as flexible as possible, standard hours that aren't designed by an algorithm, ample leave, and most less than 40 hours a week) and quality, affordable child care that pays workers what they're worth.
45
Reply to ‘someone’,
This is an exaggeration! Women have a few negatives in the workforce versus men, it’s true.
The biggest, sure, is as you say, that young women might get pregnant and then leave. [Another — that is never even talked of — is that women have less energy than men. I know that sounds crazy, but think about it. Menstruation takes a huge amount of energy and many women suffer conditions related to it (from endometriosis to severe PMS, etc). Statistically, pre-menopausal women miss one extra day per month than men.]
But it is not so easy to find good employees! Women tend to be more conscientious and agreeable. In today’s market place, that is not trivial.
Before I had kids I worked for a blue chip company in customer service. Huge numbers of the young women on my floor took one and two year maternity leaves. But huge numbers of young men left because customer service drove them crazy. The company had to deal with the fact that its employees were human beings! Vive la difference :)
2
Universal child care as a substitute for optimal parental care and responsibility is never going to work and all we will end up with is troubled kids. I don't think there are many Americans left who disagree that mothers should work but Americans would like mothers to plan on bearing children based on their own abilities and the available Child care in the vicinity. Just as one would not expect anyone to shoot first and then ask questions one cannot expect Child care when no arrangements have been made for optimal child care.
We have free public schools and many teachers feel that they were hired to be teachers and they will tell you that many children come from homes where they receive very little caring and nurturing. We need a proper planning for balancing education in schools and loving child care.
4
@Girish Kotwal But why in the world do we make the distinction at 4 or 5? We take for granted the iea that the education and yes, care-during-the-day, of children aged 5-17 is a shared social responsibility, but we ignore the most formative, critical years of life, 0-5. It's all ery well to say optimal parental care-- yet we do nothing, essentially, to help make that possible. I would argue that we need a robust system of supports that enable parents to care for their own children OR to access high-quality care so they can work and support their families.
15
@Girish Kotwal - so what you’re saying is that if you live in an area that has very limited number of childcare slots that people should not have children because of limited childcare availability? I live in an area where there are 18 month waitlists for infant care... that means families have to put themselves on a waitlist up to 9 months BEFORE they even plan on conceiving... not even to mention the costs — astronomical!
3
@Girish Kotwal And what do you expect from fathers? Do they bear no responsibility for conception and care of children? If all couples waited for the conditions for “optimal parental care and responsibility” the birth rate would plunge and only the most privileged among us would be able would procreate. Is there any reason we as a society should not want or expect our government to help create supportive conditions for young children and both of their parents?
4
Will this argument never end? We were having this same discussion when my 40 year old daughter was born. I'm 66 years old, have 4 grown, great, well adjusted children and have been a working and stay at home parent. For over 20 years I was an educator, loved my job and felt great personal satisfaction from it. I also felt tired and guilty many days. I also stayed at home with my children for about 8 years. I loved being with them and greatly enjoyed our time together. I also remember waiting impatiently for my spouse to get home. Days without adult and outside interactions can be long, tedious and isolating. I have no regrets about either decision. Let's stop pretending one or the other is a utopia and concentrate on how we can help families with young children be more successful, healthy and productive.
130
@MatthewJohn did you read the article? This isnt about the "mommy wars" really-- it's about our failure to provide EITHER the needed supports to parents to care for their own children OR universal hgh quality child care. Instead we have a society where both parents (if there are two) MUST work to provide for even basic needs, but child care is hard to find, crushingly expensive, and ofetn not very good quality.
17
@Grace Decker Thank you for your summary of the article but yes, I did read it and most of the comments. Did you? Many of them discuss the issue of "mommy wars". I could have mentioned that I was referring to the comments. I try to make a practice of reading as many of them as possible before I comment. I shouldn't have assumed everyone does.
5
@MatthewJohn
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This is not the norm - either in many 21st c countries. or in past eras. Women tended children as a group. Then as agriculture changed demographics, family members helped each other - from Granny soothing a baby to 7 year olds running after toddlers.
We are all going stir crazy from living a very un-Paleo lifestyle where it comes to child rearing. Nuclear family model has gone extreme. No wonder many women want to work at otherwise undesirable jobs: they just want adult human contact and hate going it alone all day! The need for extra income is a separate but undeniable issue.
4
The economic reality is that, in many families, both parents must work to be able to pay the bills. In a perfect world, one parent would earn enough to support the family and the other parent could stay home with their children. It's not a perfect world and may never be.
For several years when our children were young, I worked and my husband stayed home with the kids, simply because I earned more. It was a great solution because we were living very cheaply. When we had to leave that living situation and the bills doubled, my husband had to work. Luckily, the kids started school and it wasn't difficult to find someone to watch them for a few hours until one of us got home.
Universal child care and early childhood education have been shown to give children a great start in life and should be instituted in this country.
22
@CountryGirl
Why would that be a perfect world? My daughter and her husband are both doctors, how could it be ideal for one of them not to work?
10
So Americans say they want one thing (a parent in the home for childcare), but don't act in a way to achieve it (demanding government-provided childcare). Americans also say teachers deserve more pay but vote down tax increases to pay for it. It's like the vast majority of smokers - they want to want to quit, but don't want to quit.
It's who we are, so enough with the handwringing over what the rest of the western world does and how we're deficient. We are who we are.
9
@Andy Deckman it certainly is what we do, much of the time. But I'm not willing to shrug my shoulders when faced with evidence that young children who lack excellent care when they are in their formative years -- from parents or other caregivers-- are forever impacted, and we as a whole society struggle to keep up with the growing cost. I have to believe that when we know better, we CAN do better.
9
So Americans say they want one thing (a parent in the home for childcare), but don't act in a way to achieve it (demanding government-provided childcare). Americans also say teachers deserve more pay but vote down tax increases to pay for it. It's like the vast majority of smokers - they want to want to quit, but don't want to quit.
It's who we are, so enough with the handwringing over what the rest of the western world does and how we're deficient. We are who we are.
1
Let’s face it - the issue isn’t whether both parents should work or not. The issue is that we have created an economic system that pays CEOs and executives 100s of times more that the typical employee whose wages are basically just keeping up with inflation. With the cost of healthcare, college and raising a child growing, it forces most families to be comprised of two working adults or go childless. With the later increasingly more common, is it any wonder that fewer people are getting married, birth rates are declining and people are more disconnected than ever. Fewer personal connections leads to depression, less of a safety net when trouble comes, less empathy for others and our environment
. Income and wealth inequality - otherwise known as greed - is fueling the destruction of our species....two parent families working 50+ or 60+ hour a week each is just a symptom of a much bigger problem. Sure having two working adults in a family benefits the economy (or more precisely, the already wealthy)
90
@Marston Gould
Hear, hear!
4
Ah, American Exceptionalism. In addition to being the only industrialized country that does not offer universal healthcare, it’s also the only one that has no stable plan for day care for infants and preschool children. I did not work outside the home ( I wrote, in our family study.) My three children went to nursery school - in Milan both city-run and , for the second, the Ursuline nuns. The third, in Perugia, had nuns again with a Montessori inspired program. There was some small charge, geared to one’s income. Children need supervised companionship with their peers. Parents need to work. Italy also has generous parental leave. Sometimes its good not to be exceptional.
235
@Sheila Bourke
Well, Italy as a country loves its children so yes, they would want the best for them, which means helping the parents if need be.
America’s view is not so generous or wise.
23
This article paints resistance to mass childcare as an issue that centers around a desire to control women’s lives. In fact, I think the issue for most who answered the survey was not whether women belonged at home, but whether it is better for little ones to be at home with a parent or to spend all day in an institution.
16
You may be right, but that doesn't negate the control of women. Clearly, the people who oppose the child care because ' it is not good for child' do not care what is good for women. Once again the interest of child is put higher than interest of women.
7
@Z97 So show me the research that you have done to suggest which option is better. I'll start:
https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/documents/seccyd_06.pdf
Most recent study from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development:
"When it came to understanding how these experiences might influence children, knowing simply whether a child was or was not ever in non-maternal care provided little insight into a child’s development. Children who were cared for exclusively by their mothers did not develop differently than those who were also cared for by others. Quality, quantity, and type of non-maternal care were modestly, but not strongly, linked to the children’s development regardless of family features. "
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Kinda depends on the parent, doesn't it?
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Working Class mothers have always worked. My grandmother did, to pay off hospital bills incurred when a daughter became very ill. My mother did, and went back to school too. They were both exemplary mothers--cooked healthy, wholesome food for their children, took time to ensure we did our school work, made our homes warm and loving places.
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Ah yes.... the unpaid household servant. All those bored and unfulfilled housewives. Financially and emotionally dependent on their man.
My grandmother used to say that the “good old days were not so good “. She was right.
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I think it’s pretty obvious that children are better off with a parent at home. Someone who can talk to them right after school and help them deal with their problems. Someone to help with homework, and on and on. Daycare or hired help is not the same. Not everyone has the luxury to do what’s best for their children, however, which is why we need support for stay at home parents, not day care.
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@DRS My stay at home mom never did those things, and I'm not exaggerating at all. She never, ever did.
Stay at home parenting is right for parents with certain personality traits, but I don't believe that means they are the only types who are capable of being good parents.
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@DRS
My mother never helped with homework and I seldom with her about my problems. This was in the 50s and 60s when the expectation was that the mother stayed home. She was bored and depressed, staying home did not suit her st all. When my oldest sibling was approaching college she went back to to work to help pay for it. She was happier than I had ever seen her, and a better mother too.
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@DRS I agree with the two previous commenters, but from a different angle: Both of my parents worked. But they also helped me and my sister with our homework, talked with us about our problems, and provided a wonderful childhood for both of us. My parents both enjoyed their work, and were probably better parents for it.
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Why aren't we also talking about the unrealistic demands of some workplaces that also effectively keep women with children out? For example, law firms that expect 50, 60 or 70 hour work weeks? Or, retail employers that change employees' schedule on a weekly basis with very little advance notice? (Of course, these policies could keep men out, but we've already acknowledged that the primary caregiver is usually the woman.)
At any rate, let's say you are an attorney and also a mother. You may be able to find childcare that you can afford, and you and your partner may be able to figure out how to make a 40-hour work week work. But if all of your prospective employers actually demand 60-hour work-weeks, you might decide you can't go back to work after all.
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Plenty of attorneys work 40 hour work weeks. They work in government offices and in corporate slots. They do not work in law firms where partners make high six figure and more salaries. You have a choice on what kind of Attorney you want to be. I can see how we jointly have some responsibility to help a 15 dollar an hour mother on double shifts with child care. I do not feel the same responsibility to give someone a choice between a low or high six figure salary.
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@Michael Blazin True. My dad had a neighborhood solo practice and, to put it bluntly, he never really liked to work. He worked 9-4 most days, then picked me up from my after school activities on the way home. He was more into his numerous hobbies than into work. We weren't rich, but we were fine.
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@Michael Blazin That assumes a lot about the legal market that isn't true. In-house counsel and government office jobs are highly competitive to get and are increasingly looking for experienced counsel with 7-10 years of experience in the private sector. With most law students graduating between 26-30, the child bearing years are largely over by the time you can score an in-house counsel gig.
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I am a full time, stay at home mother. My husband works 50-60 hours per week and cannot cut back on his hours. And yes, I think it's best that some one in our family is raising our children. Economically we'd be better off if we'd outsourced our children. And it would be better for the national economy if all the women worked outside the home. (Increasing the number of available employees would make it possible to pay employees less.) But who is raising the children? --Who has the energy to cook at the end of a long work day? More important who has the energy to teach a child to cook a the end of the long day? Who has the time to work grow a garden with the kids, or to take a walk with them in the afternoon? Who is thinking where the children are emotionally and academically? Who is active with the PTA and other organizations in the community? Where is the time to pass on family values and beliefs? All that time and thought would have been taken up by my career. -- Our home is our center- not our career, not our bank account. What we need is support for families, and for extended maternity/parental leave (one to two years). Our society needs part time positions for professionals-- especially for parents with young children, but teen-agers need adult involvement too.
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@kkm Your argument hinges on the notion that your husband is not as good a parent as you are. Right? He's not home with them doing all those things.
Which isn't true, really. Of course he loves them and does what he can when he's with them. Just like us working moms.
The pressure that we all work 40 or more hours per week (for jobs that almost never TRULY require that much time), or that we work in jobs who value their employees so little they can't even provide them a standard schedule, is what is driving this rift among families who operate differently.
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@kkm I'm a single mother of two children, 3 & 8 months. I work full time and I still cook dinner every night. In fact, last night, my 3yr old and I cooked dinner together while the baby played on the floor. We got in the door at 5, cooked together and it was on the table by 5:40- thank you Instant Pot! Bath time at 6:15 for the oldest, nursed the baby as we were all in the bathroom together, singing songs and having a nice time. Baby to bed and then alone time with the 3yr old. Who teaches them family values? Me. Who raises them, Me. They go to daycare where they are kept safe, socialize, learn and then they come home where our family is happy. I agree we need things like maternity leave and part time positions, but don't ask about who is raising the children, their parents are.
You've made the right decision for your family. I've made the right decision for mine. You don't have to ask questions that imply children of working parents are receiving less.
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@kkm my mom and dad both worked full time when I was growing up. My parents are both wonderful cooks and taught me how cook different things. I hated being outside (and still do), so walks or a garden wouldn't have worked, but both of my parents encouraged my love of reading and public speaking (hobbies they both hated personally) by taking me for long trips to the library's children's section and sitting through numerous debate and mock trial competitions. Both of my parents would check in with me, my brother and our teachers periodically to ensure that we were on track with both their expectations and our own. I have always felt comfortable going to either of them with any problems or issues I had and when I was first developing depression and anxiety, they both left no stone unturned in getting me the help I needed. My dad coached my little league softball team and my mom drove me all over the greater New England area for dance competitions. We drove even further than that for my brother's sport competitions. They are both also active in our community.
I know the values and traditions that are important to my family: teamwork, hard-work, empathy, and grace. I know those values because they are the ones I saw in the relationship between my parents and their relationship with my brother and I every single day.
While I understand you may realize you are limited in the bandwidth you could provide your kids if you worked full-time, speak for yourself, not others.
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It's so easy for those who don't stay home (ahem...fathers) to tell us women to stay home. You know, stay in our lane.
It's also easy for all those judgemental mothers who did stay home to tell us working moms that we're neglectful...because deep down they are dealing with their own issues and desire to justify their decision.
When the expectation is that women stay home, it hurts all of us. If you or your partner stay home, great, but why judge others and heap your expectations onto the rest of us? We all take different paths.
I'm choosing a path that gives me and my family a better financial present and future. My off work time is devoted to my child, which comes pretty easily when I'm not spending 24/7 with her. We're not all built to WANT to spend literally all of our time with our children. It's fine. Those who work in child care are a god send, and amazing, and should be paid appropriately. They help all of us, just like any other paid care taker (what, are we ALL supposed to quit work to care for our elderly parents, too?)
Child care doesn't have to be universally free, but it should be better subsidized so that parents aren't spending 30-50% of their take home pay towards it. But the child care workers should be paid appropriately, too. It benefits EVERYBODY, even those who stay home, when people who WANT to work are in the work force.
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@someone
My wife stayed at home for eight years with our two kids before going back to work.Maybe it's because we live in NYC, but the people who gave her the most snark when she was home, then again when she went back to work were not men, but other women; the ones who had made opposite choices. I would add that working is often a necessity, not a choice.
"It's so easy for those who don't stay home (ahem...fathers) to tell us women to stay home. You know, stay in our lane."
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So so true
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I'm not disagreeing with the premises so much, but pointing out a more linear relationship exists to explain the US state, in that traditional, male-focused work culture is also inegalitarian, and that explains why there is no childcare, similar to our lack of healthcare. One can quibble over the differences between US states, but generally, the US is unlikely to provide much if any support to working women.
- The US is a work country, not a quality of life one
- It is a traditional country, not an egalitarian one
These qualities are parallel, in that traditional countries work, have little regard for workers - Germany aside - and have little concern for human welfare, let alone the rights of women. In egalitarian countries, e.g., Scandinavia, childcare is subsidized, and women can work, but often choose to work less, as do men. In the US, people are expected to work, and there is little consideration of the struggles of workers and even less concern with the struggles of women.
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What this article doesn't say is that some women actually love working, or at least like it. Or that they want to keep their career going because they know too many women who found it hard or impossible to get back in the workforce after 10 or 15 years of unpaid labor. Or that they want to be independent of their partner for financial support should the relationship fall apart. That is why part time work is the ideal, not just for mothers but for fathers, too. If healthcare were not dependent on full time work, many families would opt to work less. If employers would be more open to these types of arrangements, think about how much happier the average American family would be. Yes, subsidized child care is important. But it would be less so if more parents could split their work and be home more with their children. That is why equal wages for equal work is critical, too. A man shouldn't be forced to work a job he hates because his female partner doesn't make enough money.
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@MJ "Or that they want to keep their career going because they know too many women who found it hard or impossible to get back in the workforce after 10 or 15 years of unpaid labor. Or that they want to be independent of their partner for financial support should the relationship fall apart."
These are two crucial issues not addressed in the article. Even if a mother wants to stay at home, it's often an unwise decision because her future earnings are greatly diminished, and she runs the risk of the marriage/relationship ending, leaving her with no money, no retirement savings, no job experience, etc.
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@MJ, Fixing health care is more helpful than a single-minded focus on free childcare. What parents and children need are more time together, but paid child care cannot fulfill that basic human need.
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@MJ Or the problem is capitalism and we would never make decisions like this in a vacuum.
*shrug*
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As with so many of the aspirational goals of the Democrats’ extreme left-wingers, this article would have benefited from a presentation and analysis of the costs and benefits of universal child care.
Even Bernie Sanders has admitted that taxes would have to raised on the middle class just to afford Medicare For All, and that wouldn’t include additional trillions of dollars for universal child care, free college tuition, reparations, forgiveness of college loans, and on and on.
I have voted Democrat for 60 years but I am greatly concerned that the current candidates’ competing among each other to see who can offer the biggest package of free everything for everyone will lead to Trump’s re-election in 2020.
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@Mon Ray - It is not about free so much as shifting the priorities to human welfare, not padding plutocrats assets, making peace in the world, not war. It would include shifting money away from the military, changing the tax structure, shifting spending toward human growth and quality-of-life. That is more like what Democrats are fighting for, although the Republicans frame of it as is quite different.
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@James Igoe
The US military budget is about $700 million per year, so even if anyone thought it was a good idea to eliminate the defense department entirely—which will never happen—it wouldn’t pay for Medicare For All, much less universal child care and all those other freebies all our Democratic candidates are promising.
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@Mon Ray
Presumably, though, if taxes are raised for Medicare for All, people will save money because they're not paying for ridiculous insurance premiums for their high deductible plans that cover basically nothing, right?
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The conversation should include the low wages for those who work in “affordable” childcare. I often wonder why the working parent often makes so much more money than the person taking care of the child.
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@Melinda
Supply and demand. The supply of potential childcare employees is very large, and thus doesn't command much pay. Doctors and lawyers (protected by the engineered scarcity of credentials) command much, much more.
Sure let's give pay raises to childcare employees, but remember there's no such thing as a free lunch. As a matter of public policy, it will make childcare even less affordable, less accessible.
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@Melinda
Supply and demand. The supply of potential childcare employees is very large, and thus doesn't command much pay. Doctors and lawyers (protected by the engineered scarcity of credentials) command much, much more.
Sure let's give pay raises to childcare employees, but remember there's no such thing as a free lunch. As a matter of public policy, it will make childcare even less affordable, less accessible.
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My daughter in an apprentice welding program makes $14.35 per hour. She has a high school girl watching her two kids this summer for $50 per day. Now that school is starting she needs new daycare options. Guess what they start at $20 per hour and will not take government subsidies because of the paperwork. Now she is going to have to quit the job and go on complete welfare. How is lack of self esteem a family value
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Professional child care versus parental child care: these are not opposed to each other...except in the conventional American view.
It is exactly those countries with generous paid parental leave that also provide high quality affordable child care. That is, parental care for very young children, in the first year of life, and later, day care.
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The explicit misogyny of the last presidential campaign shows what many Americans really think of women.
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"Barefoot, pregnant and tied to the kitchen table" still applies.
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@gf-A majority of white woman voted for Trump in the last election. I don't think a majority of them are women haters.
Yes Trump is an ego maniac demagogue but these women in middle America did not want an identity obsessed male hating social engineering zealot on social issues and a neo con on other issues like Hillary was.
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@gf: You overlook the fact that one of our most recent Presidential candidates was a woman, and she won the popular vote by a majority of 3 million. The problem here is not what we think about women, but with a distorted electoral college sytem of electing Presidents, which is extremely difficult to change given the rigidity of a political system designed in and for the 18th century.
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I took a 10 year break to raise my kids and then went back to the work force. If I knew that when I returned to work I would then be judged by men who have stay at home wives maybe I should have changed my mind (I worked in a male heavy field with so called traditional values). So providing childcare would be great but what about the discrimination some face for doing so? That is really the other half of the issue. It is real and prevents the advancement of women in some fields.
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It’s already proven that investing in early childhood education makes more productive citizens. We NEED to make it a priority in this country!
I have a 1-yr-old and a 4-yr-old. I mostly work full time because I have to - not only for my wages, but for health insurance and a pension I will need in the future. (My husband and I both have masters degrees.)
However, this past year I was very lucky to be able to work every other day (teaching just A days of an A/B schedule). Unfortunately, I had no other option than to pay for full-time
daycare, so I broke even and all my wages went to daycare last year.
It was wonderful. I got to nurse my infant on my days off and keep my milk supply up. My infant never really got sick. I also felt I was spending enough time with my kids, but also got to do something I felt passionately about on my days at work. I got much needed rest on my off days after being awakened during nights.
If childcare were more affordable, I’d do that schedule forever. (For example, if it were like my friend in Germany who paid less than $100/month for her kids.)
For me, part-time is best for kids and moms, but the current childcare situation doesn’t allow it.
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