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Tag-Team Parenting

Jill

A report (pdf) from the Center for Economic and Policy Research examines the differences in the division of household labor and parenting across socioeconomic lines. According to the report:

— Less educated parents are more likely to work evening and night shifts. Among working mothers without a high school degree, only 58.5 percent have a day shift.

— Within two-earner, married-couple families with young children, the most common kind of childcare is formal daycare (29.4 percent), followed closely by relative care (27.3 percent), then parental care (25.5 percent). Lower-income two-earner married couples are more likely to use parental and relative care than higher-income families.

— While 27.1 percent of married mothers use parental care, only 10.3 percent of single mothers report parental care as their most common kind of childcare.

— Low-income mothers are more likely to report that they work their current schedule to address childcare needs (41.5 percent) compared to those in the top income quartile (30.0 percent).

— The older a family is, the more likely it is that the spouses have similar schedules.


Tag-team parenting sounds good in theory, right? But it looks like it’s more about the ability to afford/access childcare than anything else. And the burden of working a non-traditional work schedule in order to care for children falls disproportionately on women: 68.5 percent of married women with young children work a traditional 9-5 schedule, while 74.5 percent of married women without children work a traditional schedule. For married men, the difference between fathers and non-fathers is just 2 percent — 63 percent of married fathers with young children work a traditional schedule, compared to 65 percent of married men without children. Having kids, then, doesn’t appear to affect men’s work schedules nearly as much as women’s. And “tag-team parenting” is more about mom making additional sacrifices than it is about sharing childcare equitably.

Ideally, jobs would be flexible enough for men and women to balance work with childcare. But the fact remains that most jobs just aren’t that flexible — or may claim to be flexible, but will nonetheless punish employees who take advantage of particular policies by denying them promotions or questioning their dedication to their career. And naturally, the burden of tag-team parenting falls disproportionately on low-income families:

“Cost containment” families may become tag-team parents because they cannot afford the high cost of quality daycare. The Children’s Defense Fund reports that in most states, the cost of quality preschool is greater than the cost of tuition and fees at the state university (Schulman 2000) and Boushey and Wright (2004) found that families in the bottom 40th percentile of the income distribution who pay for center-based childcare pay on average about one-fifth of their total income for this care. “Special needs” families, with children with disabilities or other special needs, may also end up tag-team parenting because there simply are no appropriate or affordable childcare facilities for their children in their community.

This is one reason why feminist groups have been up in arms about so-called “welfare reform” — it requires women receiving aid to work (reasonable enough), but doesn’t offer any sort of subsidized childcare options (nor do many states allow education hours to count as hours worked, despite the fact that education strongly correlates with getting and staying off of welfare). Minimum wage in New York is $5.15 an hour. Daycare costs more than that. If you’re a single, low-income parent who has to work every day, what do you do with your kids?

Subsidized daycare isn’t the only answer, but it’s an important component. Family-friendly work policies are crucial: allowing for greater periods of parental leave, flexible hours, work-from-home time, etc. And policy aside, we need fathers to take on greater responsibility for their children — and either be willing to make some of the sacrifices that women always have, or get on the front rallying lines to change it.

Thanks to Liz from CEPR, Jessica, and Elana for all sending this on to me.

9 thoughts on Tag-Team Parenting

  1. ” If you’re a single, low-income parent who has to work every day, what do you do with your kids? ”

    When I divorced, in 1992, what I did, since I wasnt receiving child support either, was to rent a tiny one bedroom basement apartment and sleep on a couch for four years so my son could have a bedroom. I made “decent” money at the time….$26K a year, but my childcare was $800 a month. My rent was $565. (This was all in greater Boston, if you’re wondering why expenses were so high.) And I was carrying $30K of debt courtesy of my ex and trying to pay that off. I only managed because of magic, smoke and mirrors. How someone manages on minimum wage, or with more than 1 child, is completely beyond me.

  3. How telling that this was posted at 4pm and only one comment is here. Where is the concern for this issue among the progressives?

    I had three kids to raise alone. I had to use welfare as I could not afford any childcare on 8 bucks and hour. The 2.50 or possibly even less (I can’t remember exactly) an hour that the state subsidized daycare didn’t even get to the halfway mark. Also, they paid out every six weeks, providers resented having to wait for such a pittance.

    I went to school while on welfare but didn’t finish. If I had received my degree in something guaranteed to pay well upon my graduation, such as nursing, or welding or some other trade, I would have been much better off.

    I didn’t own property, never received child support and basically lived hand to mouth. It can be done, but I wouldn’t with that hell on anyone. Nor would I expect anyone who has to crawl out of such a struggle to exhibit the same advantages and coverage of basic needs that the middle class takes for granted.

    Oh and of course women still pick up the slack for child and family care. Which then translates to lower pay, less promotions, less skill development, shorter resumes and more dependence for women. Frankly, I don’t see what the wing-nuts keep bleating about, they have everything to be happy about.

  4. Why do you think it’s reasonable to force women receiving state aid to work?

    I ignored this value based statement, I am glad you picked up on it.

    Isn’t caring for children work? Or is it laying around all day?

  5. Why do you think it’s reasonable to force women receiving state aid to work?

    Well, my position is a little more nuanced than that, although I didn’t get into it at all in the post. I don’t think it makes sense to have a blackletter rule saying that women who receive state aid must work. If someone is disabled or unable to find work, they should obviously still be entitled to state aid. Further, if a woman has small children to care for, she should have a choice between staying home with them and working/pursuing her education while also being able to find afforable childcare. Caring for children is work, and it should be treated as such. And low-income women should also be able to have some degree of choice when it comes to working, going to school or staying home, just as many middle and upper-income women do.

    But women who are physically able to work and who have older school-aged children who aren’t in need of childcare? Yes, I do think that they should either work or be enrolled in school in order to receive state aid. I have a feeling that this will be an unpopular position with some people here, but I do think that in order to receive something from the state, you should be giving something back. Working — whether that work is inside or outside of the home — or going to school is, for me, a reasonable part of the deal.

  6. I find this difficult to discuss when I’m not sure of someone’s starting point. It’s an area where I disagree a with a lot of assumptions many people share about the way the world works

    I think a lot of the work people do unpaid is far more useful and valuable than a lot of paid work. Paid work is whatever will make a company a profit, to say that it’s automatically better of more valuable than what people would do if they had free time, shows a faith in companies that I don’t share.

    I’ve also seen the effect on people’s lives of this sort of compulsion (which is the system we have in New Zealand). It gives employers and the state huge amounts of power, and means people have to work in jobs that make them miserable.

    Finally, unemployment is the result of the way we structure our economy, not an individual failing. New Zealand used to have full employment – as in you’d have a dozen people unemployed at any other time. Now we think that under 3% unemployment is low. Nothing about people has changed. To blame people for not being work is ridiculous when the entire economy is structure around having that reserve pool of labour.

  7. Agreed, Maia. I was hoping you’d elaborate more on your initial point — I always really enjoy what you have to say about economic issues/capitalism.

  8. If you’re going to mandate or strongly encourage that parents with school-age children work, schools may have to change. Or jobs may. Around here, kids go to school at seven-forty-five am, and can’t physically get in the building any sooner. School is out at three pm. Unless it’s one of the early closing days, when it’s out at twelve pm. And my state doesn’t have full-time kindergarten. The children go either half days or every other.

    It’s really structured with the assumption that there’s a full time stay at home parent there, and when that is not the case, it’s one more balancing act.

  9. Alexandra, I’m on the board of a charter school that serves primarily econonically disadvantaged children. Eighty five percent of our students qualify for a free or reduced student lunch; about the same percent are from a single parent household. To address the problem you have identified, we have before and after school care. We go out in the private sector and raise money to support this program, our longer school year, and smaller class sizes (what we get from the state does not cover it). In part, the charter school movement is about making the changes necessary to serve the students and their families without having to beg the taxpayers for more money, because when they vote schools don’t get any increases. That’s why we have to make school funding non-reliant on property taxes if we are ever going to address these issues comprehensively.

    To return to the theme of the post, I can’t agree with Jill’s opinion that people with a bunch of kids should be able to opt out of working. As our buddy pointed out in Get to Work, women take a huge hit over their whole lives in terms of income by not working. Collecting welfare for 10 years while you take care of 4 toddlers is not going to help anyone get out of poverty. There should be state sponsored day care for these kids while their parents work or get a degree. However, people do bear some responsibility for their reproductive choices, and I’m not endlessly willing to subsidize people who have more children than they can afford. Frankly, it’s not sustainable. I’m not into punishing people for having kids, but they have to live in the real world where you have to support them, or do your best to do so. Enouraging whole swaths of society to think otherwise is just as bad as what Linda was talking about in her book, which was more directed at the upper crust: you are living in a big fantasy bubble if you think someone else can be relied on to support you forever. The odds are not in your favor, and no one should be deluded into thinking that they are. Don’t get me wrong. I know that not everyone is in full control of their reproduction and birth control costs money; those things need to be addressed by someting other than an abstiencence class. However, taken to it’s logical conclusion, the argument that we should support parents and as many children as they want to results in a society with too many non-paid people being supported by the few who are working, and the center won’t hold. As much as I wish taking care of your own kids put groceries on the table and paid the rent, it doesn’t and won’t during our lifetimes. Welfare programs should be about safe childcare, working, and preparing people to work. Period. Not about letting poor people opt out of working for years when that will only hurt them in the long run, not to mentinon create resentement among the taxpayers who reluctantly had their tubes tied after looking at the checkbook.

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