“Juggler families”
This week, I was part of a small group that got together at the National Partnership for Women and Families to talk about their work to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act and to extend paid sick and family leave to more workers. It was a good conversation, and it reminded me that I want to look into California’s paid family leave program (which is funded through an employee tax, not by employers) in more detail.
Someone asked the question, what fraction of families don’t have a stay-at-home parent. I thought I had addressed this question in my discussion of the trends in women’s labor force participation (see Who’s "opting out"?) but when I checked, I discovered I hadn’t.
The latest figure i could find was for 2001, when 68 percent of children had both parents or the only resident parent in the labor force, up from 59 percent in 1985. Interestingly, in 1985 this was true for 51 percent of children under 6, and 63 percent of children 6-17. By 2001, the gap had narrowed significantly, to 66 percent of children under 6 and 70 percent of older children. (These figures come from Table ES.3.1.A in Trends in the Well-Being of America’s Children & Youth: 2003, a handy reference book put out by the fine folks for whom I work.)
The Work-Family program at the New America Foundation likes to refer to these families as "juggler families," which is a nice catchy phrase. Their talk of how such families have "replaced the traditional family of the breadwinner and the homemaker" is a little misleading, however. It conveys the impression that all of the working parents in those juggler families are fully committed to the labor force. But the statistics include a significant number of parents who consider themselves primarily caregivers, but also have some paid work. I’ve never seen a comparable figure broken out by hours of work — if any of my readers has, please let me know.
The National Partnership does a good job of pointing out that paid leave doesn’t only benefit families without an at-home parent; in fact, families with only one earner are more vulnerable if illness causes that earner to miss work and lose pay. Unlike increased funding for child care, many social conservatives support paid family leave; however, the business lobby bitterly opposes it.
