Half Changed World

This morning, as we were trying to get out the door, I asked D. whether he wanted to wear his purple jacket or his silver jacket.  (He’s sort of between sizes, so has two wearable winter coats.)  My red jacket, he said.  No, I said, silver or purple.  "Why isn’t the red jacket in the choices?"  he asked.

I absolutely love that question.  If this blog has a recurring theme, it’s about looking at what’s missing from the options that we’re presented with.  What are the factors that determine the range of choices from which we select?  And how can we expand that range? 

Earlier this month, Julia of Here Be Hippogriffs wrote a long post in which she talked about her and her husband’s division of household labor, and concluded:

"So that is our distribution of labor and it makes us shimmy. Does it follow some bold 1950s pattern? Yep, pretty much. Was it derived from that pattern? Hell no. We have just gravitated towards the tasks that best suit us."

I agree with Julia’s argument that what "matters is that everyone involved is in agreement over how the work gets divided."  But I’m not convinced that these decisions are ever made entirely free from societal influences.  I really liked Laura’s post today about how her life has been affected by the choices she’s made at different points and what the constraints were at each step of the journey.

Oh, the answer to D.’s question?  His red jacket is just fleece, not warm enough for the weather today.

Via Laura at 11d, I found this article from The Public Interest by Neil Gilbert on what makes a policy "family-friendly."  This article makes the policy case for the proposal from David Brooks that I discussed Friday a lot more convincingly than Brooks does, and deserves some of the attention that Brooks has been getting.  (I think the Brooks article is an attempt to popularize Gilbert’s argument, but could be wrong.)

Gilbert makes the obvious, but often overlooked, point that women don’t all want the same thing.  Far too many commentators look at a trend — whether the general trend of the past 30 years towards increased maternal participation in the work force, or the recent modest reversal of that trend — and act as if it says something about all women.  (Gilbert claims that "many feminists like to portray women as a monolithic group…." but this is a gratuitous slap; anti-feminists do the same thing.)

Gilbert argues that it’s useful to think of a continuum of work-family preferences among women in the US, from "traditional" women who "derive most of their sense of personal identity and achievement from the traditional childrearing responsibilities and from practicing the domestic arts" to "postmodern" women for whom "personal success tends to be measured by achievements in business, political, intellectual, and artistic life."  In the middle, he places "neo-traditional" women and "modern" women who fall between the two.  (Interestingly, Gilbert uses number of children, rather than labor force participation, to divide women into these categories.  I’m not convinced that’s the right measure; when I have a chance, I’d like to look up how strong the correlation between the two is.  Also, like Brooks, he totally ignores the role of men.)

This diversity has important policy implications, as I noted in my second post ever on this blog:

"Let me start by saying that I think we’ve made the right choice, for us, for now, but I don’t think there’s a single right choice for everyone, for all times. (This isn’t just a wishy-washy plea for tolerance, but a general statement of principle, which has implications when we start talking about policies to support families — but I’ll get into that another day.)"

I guess today’s that day.  Back to Gilbert.  He goes on to argue that most "family-friendly" policies  — specifically referring to day care subsidies and family leave policies —

"address the needs of women in the neo-traditional and modern categories—those trying to balance work and family obligations. The costs of publicly subsidized day care are born by all taxpayers, but the programs offer no benefits to childless women who prefer the postmodern life style and are of little use to traditional stay-at-home mothers."

Fair enough.  Gilbert then proposes several alternative "family-friendly" policies that are aimed instead at the needs of women in the traditional category such as tax credits, social security credits, tuition breaks, and hiring preferences, all targeted to stay-at-home parents.  In other words, pretty much the feminist agenda of Mothers Ought To Have Equal Rights. (A similar proposal has also been getting some attention on a thread over at MyDD.)

Where Gilbert makes a lot more sense to me than Brooks is that he doesn’t pretend that these credits are going to move women dramatically from the postmodern or modern groups into the traditional groups.  At most, he suggests that they might move some women from the neo-traditional category into the traditional category — and he argues that this would mostly overcome the existing bias of public policy towards women who are combining work and parenting.  He also acknowledges that women entering the workforce after 5-10 years of childrearing would be at a disadvantage, at least in some fields ("those careers that require early training, many years of preparation, or the athletic prowess of youth"), which Brooks blithely ignores.

This post is getting long, so I’ll come back another day to discuss some of my concerns with Gilbert’s specific proposals. (I’m much more inclined towards something along the lines of the Simplified Family Credit proposed by EPI.)  But I think the underlying point — that people have different preferences, and public policy shouldn’t only work for the majority preference — is an important one.

It seems like the people writing a lot of the blogs I’m reading are renegotiating the terms of their work lives.

• Laura at 11d is going to be teaching again.
• At this woman’s work, either Dawn or her husband is going to quit working.
• Suzanne at Mimilou is quitting her job, and is going to freelance.
• Dr B. at Bitch, PhD is going to quit her job, but is looking for another one.
• Brian at RebelDad is starting a new job, with more hours outside the home.

Some of this is clearly a matter of selection bias — I read the blogs of people who wrestle with these issues, and are more likely to find no one solution satisfying all the time.  But I also wonder if it might not be part of a movement towards seeking balance across time, not just at a given moment.

I also wanted to point out (via RebelDad and DaddyTypes), this terrific Boston Globe article on dads deaing with work-family issues.

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. 

In the past couple of weeks, I keep seeing mentions of what I call "reverse traditional families"’ — families where the mother is the primary breadwinner and the father is a SAHD — in all sorts of media.  I’m most intrigued by the fact that these aren’t stories about SAHDs as such.

• The February issue of Money has an article headlined "Get the Life You Really Want."  One of the families profiled, the Davis family, describes their goal as "wanting their kids to be raised by a stay-at-home mom or dad."  Moreover, they’ve actually managed to take turns at the at-home role, which is a nice trick; I wish the article had talked more about Laurie Davis maintained or developed her work skills while out of the work force, such that she "was recruited for a lucrative job at a medical device company" after having been home for 4 1/2 years.
• In an essay in Working Mother about the value of having two involved parents, Courtney Nowell writes: "Carter and I talked about one of us quitting… "  While they ultimately decided to both work outside the home, I like the matter of fact tone in which she considered it equally possible for either parent to stay home.
• I’m in the middle of reading Life, by Gwyneth Jones. This book is largely about gender relations, so I’m very interested in seeing what Jones does with the fact that the main character is her family’s breadwinner, while her husband is a househusband and SAHD.  So far, it’s mostly been a device for commentary about how hard it is to be a mother and a scientist.
• In one of my favorite comic strips, For Better or For Worse, last week we heard that Liz’s old boyfriend Anthony is taking a year off for parental leave.  Again, I’m looking forward to seeing what Lynn Johnston does with this plot thread; at the moment it seems to be just another way of showing what a great guy Anthony is and what a bitch his wife is: "Therese told Anthony that when the baby was born, it was HIS.  She said he was the one who wanted a family, so he could raise the baby, and he said he WOULD!"

In Kidding Ourselves, which I’ve discussed here previously, Rhoda Mahoney argues that reverse traditional families are a tipping point phenomenon.  More formally, she argues that men’s willingness to be primary caregivers is in part a function of how many other men are (or are perceived to be) primary caregivers. So the fact that SAHDs (and their wives) are showing up in the media, and not just in stories describing them as exotic Desperate Househusbands may actually be making a difference in the choices that families consider for themselves.

Laura at 11d’s thought–provoking review of Mary Eberstadt‘s Home Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Subsitutes inspired me to get the book out of the library and read it myself.

I have to agree with Laura’s conclusion that this book is a methodological "disaster area." Eberstadt is totally scornful of social scientists’ attempts to distinguish between correlation and causation. At times she cites studies that support her arguments – although if you track the footnotes, she’s often looking at popular summaries of the research, rather than the researchers’ own papers — but she totally ignores studies that disagree with her.

In a mindboggling twist of logic, Eberstadt argues that the fact that "the country’s leading child care experts have all revised downward over the years their estimations of just how much young children need their mothers" couldn’t possibly mean it’s true, but rather that even pediatricians are hopelessly misguided, even corrupted. Only she is the voice of compassion, crying out in the wilderness. Similarly, she cites the attention paid to vaccines as a possible cause of autism as society’s desperate attempt to avoid environmental (non-physical) explanations for the increase in autism in recent years, but totally ignores the painful history of the "refrigerator mom" theory.

But Eberstadt makes enough interesting points that while the book infuriated me at times, I kept on reading it. While the discussion of day care has gotten the most attention, I think it’s the weakest part of the book. Her argument for busy parents as at least one of the explanations for increased childhood obesity was convincing, although she oversells her case by ignoring many of the other factors (suburbanization, expanded tv and video game options, increased perception of crime). Her analysis of the spread of Ritalin and other psychoactive drugs is much less controversial than she implies, but seems basically accurate to me. The data she presents on the spread of STDs among teenage girls is horrifying. The overall picture she paints of parental absence from the day-to-day lives of adolescents is on target. (See Patricia Hersch’s fascinating ethnographic study of middle-class teenagers, A Tribe Apart, for an in-depth portrait of this problem.)

Eberstadt concludes her book not with policy solutions (she acknowledges the absence of "quick fixes" to the problems she identifies), but with a defense of guilt. She argues that if parents (she means mothers) who have the choice whether or not to work or whether or not to stay married make choices that are good for themselves, but bad for their children (or for society), they ought to feel guilty. Conversely, she says that guilt isn’t a factor for those who truly don’t have the choice (e.g. need the money in order to house or feed their kids, are in an abusive marriage). I think that’s simply not true. Not having choices may free you from wondering whether you’re making the best choice, but doesn’t stop you from feeling guilty that you can’t do what you feel you should.

There’s an absolutely terrific discussion about child care going on in the comments section over at 11d.  It’s stimulated by Laura’s review of Home Alone America: The Hidden Cost of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes by Mary Eberstadt.  I’ve made several responses on Laura’s blog, but have enough to say that it deserves its own post.  (I just got the book out of the library, so will presumably have more to say when I’ve actually read it.)

As I’ve noted before, lots and lots of affluent parents who have either an at-home parent or a full-time nanny also send their kids to part-day preschool for the socialization and education benefits (and to get a break).  And there’s good evidence that high-quality preschools (such as the Perry Preschool) are often more educationally rich and stable evironments for at-risk (mostly very poor) kids than they’re likely to experience at home. 

So, I don’t think there’s a lot of controversy around high-quality part-day or school-day length care for preschoolers.  (If Eberstadt is going after that, she’s even more radical than Laura suggested.) Or rather, the real controversy is around whether it’s valuable enough that society should figure out a way to pay for it for all kids, or even just all high-risk kids.

Where there’s more controversy is about full-time care — which often means 50 to 60 hours a week, once you’ve added parental commuting time to a full-time workweek — and care for infants and toddlers.  Here’s where some of the rigorous studies (most notably, the NICHD-funded Study of Early Child Care) suggest there might be some negative effects.  But the effects are fairly small, not enough that I’d tell anyone to change their behavior based on them.

So, if we don’t think child care is terrible for kids, why are we forgoing the not insignificant amount of money my husband could be making building Oracle databases?  For one thing, he was bored to death by his old job.  And he really enjoys spending time with the boys (although, of course, some days are better than others) and values the close relationship he’s developed with them.

Our lives are a lot less stressful with him home.  We don’t have to rush to get the kids dressed and out the door in the morning, and when I get stuck in a metro delay on the way home, I don’t have to worry about late fees accruing at $1 a minute.  We didn’t have to get on waiting lists the minute I knew I was pregnant (literally what you need to do if you want center-based care in the DC area). We don’t have to deal with scrambling for coverage when the boys are sick, or when a nanny suddenly quits.  He does most of our errand running during the week, so I don’t have to face the supermarket on a Saturday morning.

Laura mentioned (in her comments, scroll way to the bottom) the recent study that found that women rated actually caring for children as a fairly low-pleasure activity, slightly above housework but below cooking.  That study was of working women; I’d love to see a similar study for stay-at-home parents.  There’s more time for their kids to get on their nerves, but I think their interactions are also less likely to be stressed by the pressures of trying to get kids fed, homework done, and ready for bed at a civilized hour.

I finally got a chance to look at the new Census report on America’s Families and Living Arrangements.  The data on SAHMs and SAHDs is all the same material that I discussed last month when I discovered the detailed tables on their website, so instead I’m going to talk about the big drop in the fraction of all households that contain children.

According to the Census, in 2003, families with children made up just 32 percent of households, down from 45 percent in 1970.  This is a  big shift, driven by a bunch of factors all working in the same direction:

• More people don’t have children at all.  In 2002, almost 18 percent of women ages 40-44 had never had kids, up from about 10 percent in 1976.  (About 0.3 percent of women have their first child in their 40s.)
• More people delay childbearing (so they’re childless for longer)
• People are having fewer kids, even those from cultures that have traditionally valued large families. (A family with 1 child will have a child under 18 for exactly 18 years, while a family with 3 children, 3 years apart, will have one for 24 years.) 
• People live longer after they’re done having kids.
• Affluence and mobility both result in more single people — both young adults and the elderly — living on their own rather than with their families.  In 2003, over a quarter of all households were people living on their own.  Less than 10 percent had five or more people, down from 20.9 percent in 1970.

I think these trends make it harder to convince businesses that they have to adopt family-friendly policies.  But, as I’ve said before, it strikes me as utterly insane that in a potential working life of 50 or more years, it’s not feasible to take 2 or 3 off to focus on childrearing.

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.

As described yesterday, I searched all over the internet to try to substantiate the claim that the number of stay-at-home moms (SAHMs) has increased by 15 percent in less than 10 years.

And finally, I found it: Table SHP-1: Parents and Children in Stay-At-Home Parent Family Groups: 1994 to Present. In fact, this table reports that the number of stay-at-home mothers increased by over 19 percent between 1994 and 2003, from 4.5 million to 5.4 million.

I hope that some of you are saying "but…" right now. Doesn’t 5.4 million sound awfully low? For perspective, there were over 93 million women between the ages of 16 and 65. How can this be right? The catch is that Census is using a very narrow definition of what constitutes a stay-at-home parent: you have to be a married parent of a child under 15, out of the labor force for an entire year, say that the reason you’re not working is to care for "home and family" and your spouse has to be in the labor force for the entire year. RebelDad did an excellent job least year of explaining the drawbacks of this definition, so I won’t repeat them.

Even though this definition isn’t perfect, this is the first longitudinal data I’ve seen on the number of stay-at-home dads (SAHDs), applying the same definition to a consistent data series over time. They found 98,000 SAHDs (using this narrow definition) in 2003, down from a high of 106,00 in 2002, but up from just 49,000 in 1996. However, because the number of SAHDs is relatively, there’s a lot of "noise" in the figures — I asked the Census bureau, and they said that the drop from 2002 to 2003 isn’t statistically significant. One way that statisticians deal with this kind of noise is to pool the findings from several years. So I compared the average number of SAHDs for 1994-1996 to the average number for 2001-2003, which suggests a whopping 50.8 percent increase. Just comparing 1994 to 2003
produces a 28.9 percent increase, also quite impressive.

One way to get a sense of the limitations of the definition is to compare this series to a similar one that just looks at married couples, and whether one, both or neither is in the labor force. This comparison indicates that in 70 percent of the married couples where only the husband was in the labor force, the wife met the definition of "stay-at-home mother." But in the married couples where only the wife was in the labor force, only about 10 percent of the husbands met the definition of "stay-at-home father."

One reason for the gap is the requirement that only spouses of year-round workers can count as "at-home parents." I’m not certain, but I think that taking maternity leave is considered as being "not in the labor force." If that’s the case, my husband wouldn’t have counted as being an at home dad last year, because I was on maternity leave for 12 weeks. Adding back in the parents who meet all of the other requirements to be an at home parent would increase the reported number of SAHDs by 60 percent, to 157,000, but the reported number of SAHMs only by 12 percent, to 6 million. I also think men are less likely to say that the reason they’re not working is to "care for family and spouse."