[acb-hsp] What Happens When You Can't Afford Your Children?

[peter altschul]

What Happens When You Can't Afford Your Children?
  Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, Alterationet July 15, 2012
  Helping highly educated women have it all is a hot topic, from 
Anne-Marie Slaughter's stAtlantic starticle to Amy Chua's book 
about Chinese child-rearing stTiger Mothers stffPamela 
Druckerman's ode to French parents.  The blogosphere is on fire.  
Missing from this discussion is the plight of working-class women 
to have it stat allst.
  Since the Great Recession, a larger portion of adults worry 
that they cannot afford children.  Doing so often requires a 
stark choice between jobs essential to the family's solvency or 
adequate supervision of the young.  The class contrasts are wide 
and growing starker.
  The lives of upper-middle-class women have been remade to make 
two high-profile careers the norm.  Sociologist Paul Amato and 
his colleagues found that those with the highest marital quality 
were the upper-middle-class, two thirds of whom had dual income 
marriages (stAlone Togetherst, 2009).  The others have husbands 
with six-figure-plus incomes.
  These couples marry and have children later.
  When they do, the marriages are more stable and partners tend 
to be more supportive of each other's work needs.  The men and 
women have made it into high status positions with more 
flexibility in scheduling work activities, and they have the 
resources to supplement parental time with high-quality 
caretakers.  If the women (and increasingly many of the men) must 
give up the gold ring -- the career capping position that 
includes ultimate power, status or income -- to meet their 
families' needs, they can still achieve the good life and manage 
it well.
  In contrast, working-class women are in a bind.  Relatively few 
can find husbands earning income sufficient to support a family 
even in meager circumstances.  And working-class male employment 
has become more subject to downsizing and layoffs even when the 
pay is adequate.  Moreover, with the majority of new jobs coming 
either in small business or services, the employers may have less 
flexibility in accommodating children's school schedules or 
unanticipated child care and health emergencies than large 
employers and professional offices.  The result makes the class 
divide in finding family friendly workplaces a chasm.
  First, college-educated women are more likely to enjoy greater 
job security and benefits such as family and medical leave.  The 
U.S.  Census Bureau reports that almost two-thirds of new mothers 
with a college degree or higher received any kind of paid 
maternity leave, compared with less than one-fifth of those 
without a high school degree.  In addition, women with less than 
a high school education were four times more likely to be let go 
of during their pregnancies or within 12 weeks after the birth of 
their first child than were women with a college education.  (See 
Table 7 of the report).  In part because they enjoy more flexible 
workplaces but also in part because the price of leaving the 
workforce is so high in terms of income loss and harm to career 
advancement, middle-class women have become much more likely to 
remain employed after giving birth.  According to the Census 
Bureau, 28 percent of women with less than a high school degree 
worked during their first pregnancies, 70 percent of those with 
some college, and 87 percent of women with a college degree (or 
higher) were in the workforce.
  Perhaps even more significantly, economist Heather Boushey 
found that the "child penalty," the extent to which having a 
child decreases a woman's odds of having a job, is negligible for 
highly educated women, while it is considerable for women with 
less education; employment rates for women with less education 
who had children at home were 21.7 percent less than for those 
women with the same education who did not have children at home, 
while for women with a graduate degree, the "penalty" rate was 
1.3 percent.
  Growing class-based differences in the cognitive investment in 
young children make these differences not just a problem for the 
parents, but for the life chances of the children.  Despite their 
greater work-force participation, high-income mothers report 
spending as much time with their children as the mothers of a 
generation ago, and the fathers spend more time.  "Helicopter" 
parents closely script their children's activities as they 
schedule soccer practice, piano lessons, tutoring, and other 
activities, and juggle nannies, car pools and two-parent 
chauffeuring.
  In contrast, working-class children are more likely to be left 
on their own or in the care of an unreliable cast of friends and 
relatives.  They are more subject to the negative influence of 
dangerous streets and poor role models, and more likely to attend 
inadequate schools where parent involvement is more critical to 
educational success.  Princeton professor Sara McLanahan observed 
that the class-gap in resources that comes from differences in 
family stability, income and parental time spent with children 
has increased dramatically over the last 40 years.
  So, too, has the achievement gap.  As Harvard's Robert Putnam 
(and author of stBowling Alonest) recently pointed out at the 
Aspen Ideas Festival 2012, there is an increasing class gap for 
children in the time spent with parents as well as in enrichment 
expenditures, and he concluded that the "bottom line" shows 
"growing class gaps among American youth in all predictors of 
success in life."
  Remaking workplaces to accommodate families should be the 
ideal, but in today's marketplace such proposals are likely to 
exacerbate class disparities.  Instead, we should rethink family 
support at the societal level.  Separating health care from 
employment through Medicaid expansion or insurance exchanges 
would allow employers to be more flexible in designing part-time 
employment, and allow parents to cycle in and out of the job 
market without losing healthcare benefits.  Redefining 
unemployment assistance to include parents temporarily out of 
work because of family obligations would make it easier for 
families to manage without placing additional burdens on marginal 
employers.
  On a longer term basis, real solutions include extending 
state-funded pre-school education and affordable child care and 
better coordinating the school day with parent's working hours.  
All three proposals have the added benefit of addressing the 
cognitive development of the most at-risk children.
  Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law 
at George Washington University Law School.  She is the author of 
numerous books and law review articles on gender and family law.  
June Carbone is the Edward A.  SmithstMissouri Chair of Law, the 
Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas 
City.  Cahn and Carbone are the co-authors of "Red Families very.  
Blue Families."
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