Let's talk about childcare
Who exactly should get paid for the job of raising kids?
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This is the first of two posts on childcare. It was going to be one, but got very long so I’ll share the second half next time. STAY TUNED!
There’s a debate currently happening about how the US should deal with childcare. It’s expensive, there’s a labor shortage, parents are overextended, etc. That’s been true for a while, but the debate gained more attention lately because it was included in President Biden’s Build Back Better spending plan, which was working its way through congress late last year. Biden’s plan fizzled in congress, but it still got people talking.
I am not an expert on this topic and I have tried to avoid explicitly political themes in this blog. But I have spent a lot of time thinking about the issue, reading up on different positions and restructuring my own life in order to find tenable childcare solutions. And one of the best recent reads I’ve seen was this New York Times piece in which Matt Bruenig argues that any future policy should include financial support not just for outside-the-home childcare (for example, daycare) but also payments for stay-at-home parents.
It would be possible to give parents with young children a choice between heavily subsidized child care services or a cash benefit to compensate them for care at home. Finland and Norway already do it.
It would also be popular. Around half of children below the age of 3 are cared for by their parents, and a majority of parents say they want this option. This arrangement is most prevalent among parents with lower levels of education and households with lower levels of income.
Bruenig goes on to argue that among other things, such a plan would take pressure off of a formal childcare industry that is overtaxed and understaffed.
This makes a lot of sense. Childcare is work, and a stable population is the bedrock of our economy in the US — meaning everyone benefits when people have kids. So, maximize options. Give people choices and make it easier to have and care for children no matter which arrangement people prefer.
However, Bruenig’s piece prompted pushback, including a viral bunch of tweets from author Jill Filipovic. She argues against the “traditional” family (in this case, the nuclear family) and suggests that instead “we need a robust social welfare state.” Filipovic’s argument seems to boil down to two main points. The first is that when you pay parents for the at-home work of raising kids, mostly moms end up staying home. And Filipovic asserts that being a stay-at-home mom is bad for women.
However, a piece by Lyman Stone published by the Institute for Family Studies yesterday casts doubt on that idea. Stone combed through a bunch of research and found that “stay-at-home mothers do not appear to be miserable. They have virtually the same self-rated happiness as other parents. The idea that entrance into the workforce has some extraordinary happiness-boosting effect on women is therefore a myth.”
Significantly, Stone also found that this myth is “based on a calculated refusal to listen to what mothers themselves say.”
Strong majorities of mothers under 55 agree that housework is as fulfilling as employment. Depending on the year and the survey you prefer to cite, between 53% and 79% of mothers had this view. If being a stay-at-home mother is in fact a miserable lot in life, then these mothers must all be terribly mistaken about what is fulfilling to them, a rather strange position to advocate.
Other research has similarly found significant support for being a stay-at-home mom, including among moms.
I think we have to listen to those people. It really isn’t satisfactory to tell folks who are otherwise content that they would be better off if they abandoned their most deeply held views on family and adopted someone else’s. Obviously opinions about stay-at-home parenting are mixed, including among the parents themselves, but it doesn’t make sense to argue that something is fundamentally or inherently damaging when millions of people are happy with it.
The second part of Filipovic’s argument appears to be that having stay-at-home moms teaches people the wrong values. Here’s the salient tweet:
More mothers at home makes for worse, more sexist men who see women as mommies and helpmeets. Men with stay-at-home wives are more sexist than men with working wives; they don’t assess women’s workplace contributions [fairly]; and they are less likely to hire and promote women.
Filipovic wants to use public policy to undo this set up, or in other words as a tool to reengineer values1.
In practice and on an individual level, I don’t think Filipovic and I are so far apart. I want my wife and I to be equal partners in our marriage, and I want my kids to see us as co-leaders of the family, rather than as a leader and a helper. My professional networks are mostly made up of duel-income, professional class families and it’s a perfectly fine world to live in.
But that doesn’t really matter because here, again, we have to listen to people. So what if a particular family arrangement teaches values that Filipovic or I or anyone else disagrees with? Do people not have a right to choose whatever kind of family they want? And if they choose a family with “mommies” and “helpmeets” should that not be their choice? Why opt for a policy that limits choices and attempts to pick winners and losers with values — especially when those values are widely held?2 Changing popular beliefs seems like it falls well beyond the intended purpose of public policy3 4.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that it’s better to be either a stay-at-home parent or a working parent. Rather, the point is that after looking at a spectrum of ideas with Filipovic on one end and Bruenig on the other, I’m more persuaded by Bruenig because his position is a bigger tent idea. It offers more choices and more widely distributed support. Let people choose the family arrangement they want and give them the support they need. And in the end shouldn’t policies make choice easier, not harder?
As an aside, I’m also reminded here of my time covering polygamous families as a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. A lot of people feel polygamy is inherently oppressive. They hate it. There have been efforts over the years to eradicate it from the American West. But there are also lots of people, including women, that I have personally met who are very happy practicing polygamy. It may not be for me or you (or Filipovic!). But I think you have to respect the wishes of people when they say they like a particular institution or lifestyle5 — even when that institution seems distasteful to some outsiders.
Ultimately, I appreciate that every policy choice implicitly tilts the scales in favor of some values over the others. But it strikes me as problematic to attempt to use policy to explicitly eradicate the values that a significant percentage of the population shares and likes. And as Bruenig’s hints, such a project is entirely unnecessary; we could aim for a policy that supports stay-at-home parents and working parents, and which lets people decide what kind of family life — and values — they want to cultivate. And in the end this strikes me as epitomizing a liberal society6.
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Headlines to check out this week:
Self-Actualization Is Not the Sole Purpose of Human Existence
“What I find remarkable, and quite sad, is that there seems to me to be no sense in which Mei is expected to meet her mother in the middle. The movie harbors no belief that Ming has a right to her own expectations about Mei’s conduct, no sympathy for the idea that perhaps Mei has a responsibility to her mother just as her mother has a responsibility to her. Mei wants to live the life that Mei wants to live, and as far as the movie is concerned that is the only issue of concern. That other people exist is not Mei’s problem.”
I was surprised to see the word “helpmeets” because way back when I wrote that “love is overrated” I basically was arguing that marriage would be better if people thought of themselves more as “helpmeets” than as “soul mates.” In other words, marriages that are in part economic and social partnerships are going to be stronger than those based purely on emotional bonds. Helpmeet-ism is a great thing!
But what I really think Filipovic is trying to say is that traditional (and straight) family arrangements set up only women as helpmeets. In other words, the argument is that families where the mom assumes a child-rearing role end up framing men as leaders and women as assistants. And I agree that for me, I would like to have an equal partnership in my marriage. I want my kids to see my wife and I as co-leaders, rather than seeing one of us as the helper to the other. But again, I don’t think my specific family preferences should be codified as the only subsidized option for everyone.
Imagine if this were a different issue, like religion. There are lots of people who don’t like Christianity and think it embodies the wrong values. But there are also a lot of Christians who are completely on board with their religion. Using policy to weaken Christianity in the name of “better” values would be a terrible idea, and seems to stray from the foundational idea in the US that the government isn’t supposed to pick winners and losers among religions. The same principle seems to apply to families.
Another example here is abortion. No one is proposing mandatory abortions for everyone. And they’re not arguing that, when it comes to kids, we should only fund abortion-related care. The pro-choice position is that people be able to choose, and that both abortion-related healthcare and pre-natal healthcare should get funding. I don’t know why we wouldn’t similarly strive for a “pro-choice” position on childcare that gives people both “traditional” and non-traditional options.
Filipovic has suggested that Bruenig is a sexist leftist, but I just don’t understand how giving people — mostly women — more choices, and listening to what women say they want, is the sexist position.
There is definitely a case to be made that some polygamous sects made it difficult for their members to make their own choices about their lifestyles. In other words, they made it hard for people to leave polygamy if they wanted. That is not a universe approach to polygamy in the US, though. It also raises a question about how much outsiders should get involved in other people’s cultures. Polygamists in Utah are one thing (and are a branch of my own culture) but what about polygamists in, say, Africa or the Middle East? Should we go in an impose American gender norms in such places? Would that not be a form of colonialism? I think these questions are harder to answer than is sometimes appreciated because at a certain point a desire for multiculturalism crashes headlong into the values of the multiple cultures.
Trying to bury your opponents’ (popular) values, on the other hand, is the opposite of a liberal society.