Family policy should deliver middle-class security, not progressive politics
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In 1974, the New York Times published an article titled, “In Soviet Union, Day Care Is the Norm.” The USSR heavily subsidized daycare, without which some families would have to “fend for themselves,” mothers would “quit their jobs in order to raise their children,” or some families might even “resort” to the “traditional” reliance on extended family. Some “middle-class intellectuals” didn’t think the daycare was very good. They “disliked having children raised so much of the time by people outside of the family during the early, formative years.” But even they “conceded” these are niche concerns, inapplicable to most.
One center’s director, the Times reported, “exudes enthusiasm” about “the benefits of children being able to grow up in a collective rather than being spoiled by doting parents and grandparents.” Generally, working-class women were “delighted.” Indeed, what other word could there be besides “delight” when “the vast majority of Soviet families require the salary of a working wife to make ends meet.” Soviet citizens “express astonishment when they learn that an American father can support a family of two, three or four children without his wife’s working. Many are surprised that American women would willingly have more than one child.”
Imagine telling an American in 1974: 50 years from now, our families will face these same pressures and we’ll embrace this mandatory two-earner structure and push toward this kind of national daycare system… it’s what people want, and frankly we won’t have a choice. He’d assume we lost the Cold War and our economic system had collapsed. “No, no,” you tell him. “We won! And our economy has been growing by leaps and bounds! We’re more prosperous than ever!” He’d shake his head, chuckle, and walk away. Because that’s just crazy.
Yet here we are. In recent decades, a fundamental shift occurred in the economic condition of the American family, largely unmeasured in the economic data. Whereas the typical male worker could comfortably provide middle-class security to a family of four in the 1980s, he is nowhere near able to do so today. American Compass’s Cost-of-Thriving Index, which measures the number of weeks of the median male worker’s income necessary to cover a family’s health care, housing, transportation, education, and food, climbed from 40 weeks in 1985 to 62 weeks in 2022. Unfortunately, the number of weeks in the year has remained at 52.
Families have responded by relying more on a second working parent’s income, which economists have tended to celebrate. More people working more hours means higher household incomes and GDP. But that perspective suffers from an enormous blindspot: the value of the non-market labor that parents perform at home and in their communities. Every time a parent spends an hour less caring for a child or preparing a meal or volunteering at school or coaching a team, and an hour more sitting at a desk earning a wage, we supposedly become “richer.” When the wage earned is then spent paying someone else to do that which the family once did for itself, GDP jumps yet again.
Of course, if parents given the free choice to allocate more of their time in the home or in the labor market are choosing the labor market, that hardly seems cause for concern. The problem is not the choices they are making, but rather the set of choices available. A parent’s choice to enter the workforce when the other parent’s income already supports the family has an entirely different character than a parent’s choice motivated by the need to make ends meet. In both cases, the parents are making the tradeoffs they believe best for themselves and their family. But whereas in one case the family has a genuine choice, in the other only one arrangement is plausible, and they are left to make the best of a bad situation.
This is why, in survey data, American parents overwhelmingly emphasize the importance of “being able to support your family on one parent’s income” to “being in the middle class,” ranking it alongside “owning your own home” and just behind “affording comprehensive health insurance.” Likewise, parents overwhelmingly consider it “a big problem” that “as the cost of a middle-class lifestyle has risen, families have responded by having both parents work full-time, even though many say they would prefer to have a parent at home with young children.”
The survey presented two options:
A. This is a big problem. Many families have lost the choice they want, and once had, to live a middle-class lifestyle on one income.
B. This is not a big problem. It is how the economy is supposed to work. Parents are choosing to work more and consume more, and if they want they can also choose to work less and consume less.
American parents chose option A by nearly three-to-one, with similar margins across all political parties and classes.
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