Half Changed World

So, David Brooks has noticed that it’s not always ideal to take a chunk of time off in the middle of the intensive phase of your career to take care of kids.  He thinks this is one of the reasons that people have smaller families than they’d like. So he’s got an idea:

"This is not necessarily the sequence she would choose if she were starting from scratch. For example, it might make more sense to go to college, make a greater effort to marry early and have children. Then, if she, rather than her spouse, wants to stay home, she could raise children from age 25 to 35. Then at 35 (now that she knows herself better) she could select a flexible graduate program specifically designed for parents. Then she could work in one uninterrupted stint from, say, 40 to 70.

This option would allow her to raise kids during her most fertile years and work during her mature ones, and the trade-off between family and career might be less onerous.

But the fact is that right now, there are few social institutions that are friendly to this way of living. Social custom flows in the opposite direction."

So he suggests tax credits for stay-at-home parents.  He thinks this will give people more options, encourage them to have more kids, and make everyone happier.  Why didn’t anyone think of it before?

Well, let’s consider some of the scenarios under which more women might choose to have children in their early 20s:

1)  The River Scenario.  As Springsteen sings: "Then I got Mary pregnant / and man that was all she wrote / And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat."  This is basically the scenario under which age at first birth reached historical lows during the late 1940s and 1950s.  It was dependent on two conditions, neither of which exists any more:  a social compact that expected young men who became fathers to marry and financially support their wives and children, and an economy that made it possible for a high school graduate to support a family.  Even if a young woman today could find a partner her age who wanted to start a family right away (which is pretty rare in the circles I travel in), it’s unlikely that he’d make enough money to allow her to focus exclusively on child raising.

2) The Older Man scenario.  Ayelet Waldman asks whether Brooks is really suggesting that 23-year-old women should marry 40-year-old men, who are more likely than their peers to be both emotionally ready to have children and financially able to support a stay-at-home wife.  And if your goal is to be a life-long at-home parent, that’s probably not a bad strategy (if neither divorce nor spousal death intervene).  But as Rhona Mahoney points out, we’re Kidding Ourselves if we think that after 10 years of childrearing, the women in such marriages are going to have much bargaining power when it comes to family decisions.  So, they’ll be able to go to grad school — if there’s a program in the city where their husbands work — and get jobs — as long as they’re still willing to do the majority of housework and child care in order to support their husband’s role as primary wage earner. 

3)  The Welfare scenario.  Alternatively, we could decide as a society that we value child rearing enough to create a program that would financially support people who do it, to the point that they don’t need to delay childbearing until they earn enough to support themselves and/or have a partner who does so.  Actually we used to have such a program, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), also known as "welfare."  Welfare never paid enough to lift families out of poverty, but if you were willing to get by on the pittance it provided, you could stay home with your kids.  However, as Mary at Stone Court points out, welfare reform was based on the premise that this was unacceptable behavior — that no one who is able to work for pay should receive public support for not working.  Maybe Brooks is proposing to reverse these changes — but somehow, I doubt it.  (I’m particularly bemused by the rave review Brooks’ column got from familyscholars.org, who generally line up with the folks who blame AFDC for promoting the dissolution of the American family.)

I’m actually quite sympathetic to Brooks’ more general point about examining the social structures constraining the choices that women (and men) have available to them.  But there’s a huge mismatch between the scale of the social structures in question and the policies he thinks are going to change them. 

Moreover, Brooks totally fails to question the assumption that workers ought to be available for 30-year continuous careers, whether from ages 25-55 or 40-70.  It seems particularly bizarre to try to restructure all of society to make childrearing compatible with such a career, just at the time when it’s less and less likely that any of us, regardless of our family choices, will have a continuous career with a single employer. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Magazines and Newspapers, Work-family choices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.