Kieran Healy

Minding the Kids

Jane Galt is worried about the economics of childcare and she gives a good account of the hard choices women often feel they must face about bearing and rearing children:

Should we stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women. … We want to be successful as much as our husbands do. Taking five or eight or ten years off to get the kids started off right before they go to school is going to mean irreperably harming our prospects for advancement. We want very badly to convince ourselves that day care is really just as good, better even—or at the very least, that it is sufficiently not-worse that it’s justified. … And if I am a professional woman, my child is going to be spending ten or more hours a day with [a child-care provider]—more hours than they are with me. … And that’s assuming some hypothetical ideal of day care. Then there’s the actual day care we get, which pays people between $12-20K a year to babysit a large number of children.

Jane’s initial question—“Should we stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women”—effectively concedes the case as lost from the get-go. It frames the problem as wholly belonging to the prospective mother. Dad has no responsibility towards his potential offspring, is not required to make any work/family tradeoffs, and indeed has so much autonomy that a woman who chooses kids over career is “taking a huge financial bet on her husband’s fidelity.”

Jane’s dilemma is real, but its reality isn’t a necessary fact about the world. Rather, it’s a product of how the institutions of work and family are organized. As she herself says in passing, “society is not set up to allow women to take a break. Jobs aren’t made to accommodate it. And neither is marriage.” She’s right. But instead of framing the question in the terms society hands to you (this is entirely a problem for individual women which necessitates a tradeoff whose costs are borne solely by individual women), we can ask how these institutions might be reconstructed.

Two useful places to begin are Nancy Folbre’s The Invisible Heart and Joan Williams’ Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It. If you’re interested in fresh and practical perspectives on work/family conflicts, I’d recommend both these books, especially Williams’. (Here’s a Q&A with Williams.)

Folbre is very good on the general state of affairs that allows corporations to free-ride on (and profit from) the informal production of care within the household. (This is the much-neglected “invisible heart” of the title.) Williams focuses on the same set of choices that Jane discusses, showing how they are not the unavoidable, individual tradeoffs for women that they may appear. As Williams shows, the problem does not lie with women who want to have it all (and who subsequently can’t decide what to do), but with the “Ideal Worker Norm” built into the structure of professional careers. This is the gendered conception of the good employee, the role that companies want their employees to play. It’s institutionalized in their formal and informal expectations about how workers should behave on the job, in systems of reward and promotion, and in the benefits the state provides to workers and employers. It presupposes, at bottom, that the employee has someone at home to take care of him. It’s what needs to get reconstructed if there’s going to be any real progress on child care in the United States. In the long term, stop-gap solutions of the sort mentioned by Mark Kleiman just continue to let organizations in the formal economy off the hook.

Now, framing the issue this way will not make the problem Jane faces disappear. An individual woman deciding whether to have a child still faces the decisions she describes. But your basic orientation to the problem really does matter. The social world is not natural, which means there’s a sociology and a politics of child care as well as an economics. The institutions that structure people’s career paths may have deep roots, but that’s not because they spring naturally out of the earth. Cross-national comparison shows both that there’s considerable variation in the institutionalization of child care, and that this variation can have odd origins. For example, a very nice paper by Kimberly Morgan shows how working parents in France, Sweden and Germany presently live, for good or bad, with the residue of 19th-centrury conflicts between church and state over children’s education. These institutions aren’t immutable, either. In fact, in the U.S. they’ve changed a great deal since the early 1980s, often in response to surprisingly small shifts in law or policy.

Looking at the problem this way makes one less likely to fatalism about tragic choices, wanting to have it all, and the inevitable clash of work and family. It allows you, as Williams does, to propose some practical social policies—often as simple as changing the tax incentives offered to corporations—designed to shift the balance in favor of families. It won’t solve the problem overnight, but it does offer a more powerful analysis of it. It also has the virtue—as C. Wright Mills put it forty years ago—of letting us “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society,” rather than forever being stuck at the level of individual women facing insoluble work-family tradeoffs.

Well, this is probably just further complicating a matter that is already complicated enough, but my concern is not just for the women out there making these decisions today, but also includes the women who have already made these decisions—a coin toss on the promise of investments paying off—between family and market place, and are now living out their lives in a state of perpetual punishment—because there were no choices women could make without suffering, both then and now.

I stayed at home and raised my children, and then became a single mother. I went back to school the day I put my youngest child on the school bus, but I was still gambling on a future embedded in gender bias, that potent little author of our past and present dilemma. Women’s work is devalued, and the fact that the body of the woman gives birth to the child devalues all future relations that stem from and/or negotiate with that process. The problem goes light years beyond the economics of childcare, and yet, addressing the economics of childcare is essential to the fulfillment of any woman’s promise.

Taking a closer and far more critical look at the way the United States addresses social security is crucial to the investments women are making in their career choices. For all the years I spent married and at home raising my children, I was given absolutely no credit in social security benefits from the government. All of my benefits were, ostensibly, tied to those of my husband. It is for this reason I am wary of across the board negotiations to benefit “families,” when the definition of family can mean one thing today, and completely another thing tomorrow, particularly when the so called ‘bread winner’ decides to move on to greener pastures. The woman, if she elects childcare duties, stands to lose so much more than our present system of accountability is willing to acknowledge. If the abandoned woman never remarries, then she can redeem whatever stake she may have had in her husband’s social security benefits, the widow’s veil, more or less. She stands with nothing on her own, however, and this, in my mind, is a gross reflection of the gender bias that so devastatingly devalues women’s labor, both in the home and in the marketplace.

We must, whether we elect to stay at home, or develop a career, insist that our government place a value commensurate with the service being rendered on childcare. To shortchange in social security benefits, the woman who stays at home, is completely on par with the current pay scale for those we entrust with our children’s lives. Either way, our future is compromised. Women must not only advocate for social security benefits for the woman who elects to stay home and raise her children, but also for equitable pay for those who provide childcare. There is an identifiable reason why women are quickly becoming the largest group of poor in America, and that reason is, as always, gender bias. Addressing that gender bias means that we must first recognize it, and second, identify its workings not only in our own lives and choices, but in the lives and choices of those women who have, and will continue, to enable us to make choices.

Wow, Kieran. And WOW Darleen. Jane/Megan, alas, certainly does lay out a problem, from the perspective of the putative “career woman” contemplating her mythical “career path”, and you both have given tours de force of sociological and personal analyses.

And yes, there are lots of factors not considered- American business gets breaks that are unheard of in the rest of the industrialized world—such as fewer vacation days, other leave and disability policies, though, it also bears health care costs that are usually picked up by the state in… the rest of the industrialized world. Of course, one of the items picked up by the state in our industrialized competitors tends to be… child care. On net, we are far nicer to our busines enterprises than are competitors are—and the spirit of our business culture is shifting more towards across the Pacific (think about those nice working conditions in China and Southeast ASia!) than across the Atlantic (that damned Axis of Weasels and their pussy 6 week vacations)…

Though, to be sure, it has been impossible to make a “family neutral” tax policy. In the United States, there is some serious tax benefit to just one parent working—you get a better rate. Indeed, at the margins, its far better for the already working parent to try to get the last marginal dollar, even at a “higher bracket”, than for the other spouse to work, factoring child care costs, and the most “anti-family” tax policy ever conceived by an industrial nation- our “from dollar one and kicks out at 85K” social security tax.

On net, given all this, I would say that, taking a look at women like Jane/Megan, this DOES become a potentially agonizing choice—WHEN IT IS EVEN A CHOICE. The reality is, with costs of everything going to the moon (and thanks to the insidious social security tax, see above), its often not a choice of whether Mommy stays home (or occasinoally Daddy), but, at best, are of which variety of child care to employ.
To even think you have the choice is a luxury—actually having the choice is a bigger luxury (though yes, we will then economically devalue you if you elect to leave the workforce!).

And yet, discouraging bourgeois people from having children (which is what we are doing, as they have done in Europe for decades longer) means that the population on which OUR OWN SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS DEPEND will consist of the children of non-bourgeois people, who tend not to earn as much. Europe has turned to swarthy people from other parts of the world to do the work of keeping their pensions funded; we are slowly going there. I’m sure that means that as time goes on we will treat our American workers even nicer than the direction in which we are going.

Ah, what a wonderful world.

Wow, Kieran. And WOW Darleen. Jane/Megan, alas, certainly does lay out a problem, from the perspective of the putative “career woman” contemplating her mythical “career path”, and you both have given tours de force of sociological and personal analyses.

And yes, there are lots of factors not considered- American business gets breaks that are unheard of in the rest of the industrialized world—such as fewer vacation days, other leave and disability policies, though, it also bears health care costs that are usually picked up by the state in… the rest of the industrialized world. Of course, one of the items picked up by the state in our industrialized competitors tends to be… child care. On net, we are far nicer to our busines enterprises than are competitors are—and the spirit of our business culture is shifting more towards across the Pacific (think about those nice working conditions in China and Southeast ASia!) than across the Atlantic (that damned Axis of Weasels and their pussy 6 week vacations)…

Though, to be sure, it has been impossible to make a “family neutral” tax policy. In the United States, there is some serious tax benefit to just one parent working—you get a better rate. Indeed, at the margins, its far better for the already working parent to try to get the last marginal dollar, even at a “higher bracket”, than for the other spouse to work, factoring child care costs, and the most “anti-family” tax policy ever conceived by an industrial nation- our “from dollar one and kicks out at 85K” social security tax.

On net, given all this, I would say that, taking a look at women like Jane/Megan, this DOES become a potentially agonizing choice—WHEN IT IS EVEN A CHOICE. The reality is, with costs of everything going to the moon (and thanks to the insidious social security tax, see above), its often not a choice of whether Mommy stays home (or occasinoally Daddy), but, at best, are of which variety of child care to employ.
To even think you have the choice is a luxury—actually having the choice is a bigger luxury (though yes, we will then economically devalue you if you elect to leave the workforce!).

And yet, discouraging bourgeois people from having children (which is what we are doing, as they have done in Europe for decades longer) means that the population on which OUR OWN SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS DEPEND will consist of the children of non-bourgeois people, who tend not to earn as much. Europe has turned to swarthy people from other parts of the world to do the work of keeping their pensions funded; we are slowly going there. I’m sure that means that as time goes on we will treat our American workers even nicer than the direction in which we are going.

Ah, what a wonderful world.

I think the gender framing point is a good one. Still, there are certain biological advantages to having it be the woman staying at home and, say, breast feeding the infant. Once the kid is weaned, I’m not sure why it would need to be the mother—and, of course, there are alternative feeding methods. Still, at the aggregate level, women do seem more predisposed to the nurturing role. How much of that is biological and how much is sociological is unclear, although I don’t know that it matters.