Mommy-Tracking the Ivy Leaguers

You know what is most irritating about this article? It’s about Ivy Leaguers. I am one of them, and I can cry me a river about how hard my life is because I chose an academic career and to be a mom at the same time…but you know — who cares? I’m relatively privileged.

The NY Times always does “lifestyle” pieces about the rich, the very rich and the about to be very rich. It’s irritating, but not worthy of much more comment.

I am gladdened by Kieran’s points about the lack of affordable childcare and the discussion of life/work issues in such a context, but let’s NEVER make Yalies the center of this debate.

And what does Abugo’s “getting the best” mean? The best of what?

What always irritates me is the way that well off women (and I include here anyone on more than £20,000 a year) frequently ignore the degree to which the choices we make are made on the back of other women.

Our entire childcare structure looks like bloody meerkats. Poor women look after the children of rich women in order to be able to give second-class care to their own. In some cases they give their children third class care because of the scandal of imported childcare which gives visas to women to become nannies but not to their children.

Did you hear of the ongoing row in Canada? Nannying is classed as semi-skilled so a visa for nannying comes with longer obligations to the sponsoring employer than does skilled (ie male) work. The result has been a form of imprisonment for many women and guess what? Their employers were frequently nice young liberals who see themselves as helping.

Perhaps they simply don’t want to be with men who would choose that – they’re not ‘ambitious’ enough or something like that.

I’m betting watching Ozzy and Harriet reruns isn’t your idea of bliss.

Why are you so convinced that traditional gender roles and gender discrimination are bad?

Does it bother you that some smart Yale girl prefers a crusty young man with a fat wallet to an enlightened man without one?

Relax, there are still some crusty young women that will let men fret over whether to stay home or just do the career.

I mean did you REALLY think there would be no counter-revolution, that the forces of repressive patriarchy had no moves left for the future?

Remember, the gender-neutral forces of status, class and envy can still bring a some serious gender differentiation to bear.

Just go what some Gloria Steinem re-runs and you’ll feel much better…

How better to prepare for competent parenting than with a robust program of Home Economics for $23 per unit down at the local JC? Of course, you won’t land a guaranteed sugar daddy at JC, so I guess it all makes perfect sense.

This article made me so angry. I really hope the data are not indicative of a trend among female undergrads at other colleges and universities. These women are obviously not getting the education they need.

fjm, so your argument suggests that rich women who stay at home and look after the kids — or “have a grand time with the kids”, as Mr healy so steoreotypically sees it — are actually allowing less well off moms to spend more time with their own kids? I don’t think so. It just means more competition for fewer nanny jobs.

Oh, come on now! It goes as far back as Adam Smith, that you make more pins by having one person make the heads, and the other make the shafts, than by having both people make both. Why isn’t one person raising the children full time, and the other devoting themselves completely to being employed, more economically efficient on the same theory? And if it’s almost always the woman doing the raising, I hope you haven’t really bought into that crazy notion that women and men don’t on average have different biological imperatives…

If I see anything to complain of here, it’s what went unmentioned: The terrible inefficiency of scarce college slots being consumed by people who have no intention of using the education they’re obtaing. Maybe the top schools could come up with formal “Mrs degree” programs, that would allow women who intend to become housewives the social interaction as peers with the men they’re hunting, while leaving the class slots available for the more career minded?

And to be fair, of course, a formal “Mr. Gigalo” program, too.

brett bellmore, the purpose of an Ivy League education is to enable the recipient to lead an examined life, not to make a lot of money as a bond trader.

On another point, why doesn’t max sawicky consider a third option–not having children unless you’re married. It never ceases to amaze me that left/liberals, who are so hot to stop us from smoking, make us wear seatbelts, prevent us from telling dirty jokes in the workplace, ban fox hunting etc., somehow blench from recommending the sort of individual behavioral change that would actually improve people’s lives.

Yeah Brett, because male Ivy League graduates always put their educations to such good use…

Also what’s annoying is that it raises it as a strict dichotomy: career or child-raising, which is rather misleading. For it is possible to put together both, to an extent.

And the commenter above who points out that none of the women would consider choosing a husband who wants to share in the child-raising is right: that’s ridiculous.

But I’d remember that these people are 20; I’m 20 and I know that all of my grand plans are likely to be rather different in 10 years.

[A mother of a student said] “I do have this bias that the parents can do it best,” she said. “I see a lot of women in their 30’s who have full-time nannies, and I just question if their kids are getting the best.”

This a quite a quote. Does this woman also see a lot of women in their 30’s who ARE full-time nannies? Are their kids getting the best? Is every single one of their kids less advantaged than every single one of the kids of the women she’s talking about? I believe so. Who’s got the real problems here?

News Flash: The New York Times is run by (mostly) men who wish it were the 50s or the 1890s again. And panders to advertisers and readers who ditto.

Other News Flash: even at the most elite universities you can find first and second-year students who will say stupid things to reporters.

I may be reading too much into the names and hometowns, but I wonder about the backgrounds of the students quoted. If, as I suspect, they’re first-generation Ivy, their intentions may also say something interesting about social stratification and glass ceilings even within the upper brackets.

Welcome to the real world, Kieran: you can’t have income parity without putting in the time. Not at MY expense, anyway.

People have to make choices… and there’s absolutely no ethical justification for forcing ME to subsidize the choices that YOU make. A couple who wants an adequate mix of income and attention for their family–whatever “adequate” means to them–is bound to split the effort in a way that works for them. If the woman isn’t willing or able to make trade-offs in her professional life, then the man usually must… unless they can afford full-time help, which carries its own trade-offs.

As an old commanding officer of mine used to point out, “fair” is what you pay to ride a bus. [You can safely assume that I know how to spell “homophone.”] So get over it, and quit hassling young women who are, after all, only doing exactly what YOU would do in their shoes.

Hektor graces us with the following comment:

“‘“Oursourcing’ child care is the time-tested model. It is you who should try to defend your new-fangled childrearing approach to the rest of us.”

I’m looking forward to his next post, when Hektor puts the burden on us for not pursuing careers in subsistence agriculture, warrior, or divination sectors of the economy.

Better yet, perhaps Hektor will defend the time-honored model of hunter-gathering clans. I understand that whole agricultural thing is pretty newfangled.

Now this is interesting. Kieran ostensibly is writing about a wrong-headed NY Times article, and not about the subjects of that article. Further, Kieran insists that he does not begrudge the subjects–college-age women who see themselves as future stay-at-home mothers–their choices.

Then he attacks the young women.

These young women “seem oblivious.” They are ‘complacent’ and “free riders” (in a new and unusual use of the term, to mean, people who aren’t doing what I’d have them do).

And then, to top that, Kieran spends a paragraph ridiculing the reported statement of an 18-year old young woman.

(One can only imagine how he treats the students in his classes!)

All of this, for what? Supposedly the problem is that the Times article has the wrong frame. But, of course, it really doesn’t have the frame that Kieran suggests.

We are supposed to be surprised by the choices these young women are saying they’ll make–surprised and disappointed. And we’re supposed to think of this as Kieran does, as a problem that should be solved.

The reaction quoted in the article makes that quite clear:

For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation’s top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.

“They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they’re accepting it,” said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies at Yale. “Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

“I really believed 25 years ago,” Dr. Wexler added, “that this would be solved by now.”
_____________

Kieran misunderstands–he’s the intended audience for this piece, and his reaction–scorn for these young women, and renewed attention to the issues related to their choices–was the desired one.

Shorter Kieran: Apparently, wealthy women are rushing to embrace a particular domestic arrangement which Kieran doesn’t happen to like very much. This bothers Kieran–although he respects their freedom to choose–because the non-wealthy can’t afford the domestic arrangement that wealthy women seem to prefer. Kieran’s solution: massive public subsidies and social support for an entirely different domestic arrangement, which wealthy women are currently fleeing in droves, but which Kieran happens to like much better.

I’ve practiced law for over 20 years, watching many women struggle with the competing demands of work and child-rearing. It’s painful even for me as an observer. Fair or not, it’s just a brute fact that women care more about balancing these conflicts than men do and end up making the sacrifices. (As for me, I’m infertile so the issue hasn’t come up.) Many of them end up not having children at all.
I’ve toyed with the modest proposal that instead of having young women in their prime, child-bearing years (another brute fact, by the way) deferring childbirth and, often, marriage to their age peers while pursuing their careers, we ought to return to the practice of women marrying somewhat older men. They could spend the key child-rearing years at home while affluent hubby footed the bill and re-enter the career market free, energized, and able to be the same type of hard-driving a**hole that hubby had to be to make it.

seth, nobody said that being a stay-at-home parent means never going back–but the working world does not stay in time-stasis while you are rearing your cihldren. Unless your wife is returning to an unskilled position where lost work experience and time is irrelevant, she is [number of years out of the workforce] behind in experience, job skills and current information. And that time off is opportunity cost, not merely lost salary.

This persepctive seems to treat children like a car or a garden that can be enjoyed while someone else does the labor.

Funny how we only chide women for offloading their childcare. When a man spends long hours at work, nobody asks him why he doesn’t involve himself in childcare, or why he lets “someone else” do the labor.

m. gordon, I suspect these young women will get a clue when they realize that childrearing is not all rocking the sleeping baby in one arm while holding open one’s book of French lessons with the other.

This is the norm in the world today and was the norm in industrial and even post-industrial societies.

hektor, this isn’t true. In most of history, “work” was where you lived. There was no childcare because the children didn’t go anywhere.

m. gordon, I suspect these young women will get a clue when they realize that childrearing is not all rocking the sleeping baby in one arm while holding open one’s book of French lessons with the other.

I bet you dollars to donuts that a good number of these Ivy Leaguer stay-at-home moms end up hiring nannies anyway. I’ve seen it happen.

It is fairly clear that the women who get portrayed as the represenatives of women are choosing a quasi traditional role. And it goes back to previous generations. It is interesting how the alleged “anti materialists” of the sixties and seventies morphed into pioneers of perhaps the most conspicious spending in our history.

One thing that disturbs me in all this is that it really isn’t “traditinal values” in a full sense. These women do not say that in this role as full time housekeeper I am going to help rebuild neighborhood or take on the other functions that stay at home moms once held. Their kids are not playing in the streets with other neighborhood kids, there is a whole set of institutional slots starting as soon as they can toddle. And they plug the kids in.

Or that’s the cliche which is at least somewhat true. Motherhood seems to have become a very high stress occupation were as before it was simply really tough at times, nowadays there seem to be all kinds of goals that must be met and an accompanying sense of rivalry and inadequecy.

Not that any of this is completely new, but it has IMO intensified.

Hektor, if you think I am criticizing women (and men, for that matter) who make the choice to send their children to daycare, you are gravely mistaken. Nevertheless, given the family structures of modern society, women who want to work outside their homes must pay other women (daycare workers and nannies are rarely male) to care for their children; most of us do not have an extended family of available caregivers. We are generally paying childcare workers very low wages (daycare workers are at the very bottom of the income scale, probably because of the overall very low value placed on “women’s work”). Quality childcare is also expensive and difficult to find in many areas, leaving women who must work outside their homes to accept substandard care (at least, to constantly worry if they have accepted substandard care). If quality childcare were affordable and easy to find (which it should be), might I have made a different choice? Perhaps, but that’s a counterfactual that isn’t easy to puzzle out.

Furthermore, what is the “value” of an Ivy League degree? Is it legitimate to say that some jobs “don’t require an Ivy League degree,” therefore it is inappropriate for Ivy League grads to perform those jobs? If it is a “waste” of an Ivy League degree to provide infant/toddler childcare, is it a waste for an Ivy grad to be an elementary school teacher? How about a high school teacher? Does a person deserve their Ivy League degree only if they take a high-paying job? Or does it have to be socially worthy? Is it a waste of that degree to become an investment banker? Or a management consultant? Really, if you want to be talking about value, shouldn’t we all be saving starving Third World children or working pro bono for wrongly convicted death row inmates? Who judges the worth of an individual’s career choice?

As usual, women get the short end of the stick, with all-knowing male so-called feminists chiding them for recognizing the circumscribed options available to them in our patriarchal society. Do I wish that the girls quoted in the article had openly acknowledged that the reasons they think they can’t “have it all” is that our society devalues “women’s work” and assumes that women either must bear the brunt of childcare responsibilities or else pretend to occupy a traditionally masculine job role? Yes, I wish they showed a little more awareness of *why* they feel that they can’t have it all. But they aren’t the ones who are truly at fault here, and pasting the blame squarely on them is just a way of shifting responsibility for the problem onto the shoulders of the victims. The solution is not to yell at them, but to work to open more palatable options.

1) Random data point: At Penn around 1993, I took an undergraduate class in sociology of the family that surveyed itself (n=100-ish) about attitudes, future plans, etc. The thing I found very striking at the time was that the large majority of women expected to be working full-time while raising small children, while a small majority of men expected to be married to women who were staying home with kids. I remember thinking that these people were going to have some serious problems coupling up.

Who knows if the NYTimes interviewees are representative of anything at all — or if my classmates were — but if they are, isn’t it interesting that women’s expectations have changed so much in 12 years? The lesson has been learned that you really can’t have it all, although the ways these women expect to solve this reality are frustratingly inegalitarian.

2) As a mother of a one-year-old whose husband is currently the primary caretaker of our son, I have been really surprised by how uncomfortable our arrangement makes many people. And they are less worried about me than about my husband — it is really seen as rather freakish that he is choosing not to work full-time, particularly given that he now has a child for whom he is responsible. And this is in Berkeley. What’s going on here?

Bond trading has actually much lower risk of being screamed at, hit or shat upon than child rearing.

What a great line.

Granted we’re only getting snippets, but it’s interesting that none of these young women consider choosing a man who will share the work of rearing children, or perhaps even a stay-at-home dad. I wonder how much of that is cultural (“Gosh, I never thought of that!”) and how much is some kind of deep belief that if you start demanding fairness and participation by a potential husband, you’ll never find one.

But my sense is the women interviewed don’t want a man who will share the child-rearing so they can share the bread-winning. They want a man who will pay the bills so they can stay home and play house. They want any Ivy League degree and a high-status job for a few years to give them cachet, but then they want really early retirement.

Fighting words coming from a man? I’m a man who has shared the care of my young children. I know that babies and toddlers are a lot of work and that, in the early years, leaving the house and going to a job can seem like a vacation day in comparison. But I live in a well-off neighborhood with lots of mothers who, whatever they originally intended, have NOT gone back to work when their children got older. Instead, they volunteer, and they exercize, and if they have a job at all, it’s part-time and doesn’t pay much but is pleasant and status-enhancing (teaching an evening dance class, perhaps). I don’t mean to be too snarky about it–my wife isn’t one of them, and they’re certainly nice enough as friends and neighbors, but the idea that the pressures of family life are falling uniquely on these women is absurd.

I really believed 25 years ago, … that this would be solved by now.

You know, 25 years ago I think it was a lot more solved than now. I was an undergrad 25 years ago–the women I knew then did not aspire to be mommies. I think there’s been quite a lot of retrograde motion since then.

I turned on Comedy Central the other day in the middle of an act, so I’m not sure the comedian’s name, but he was riffing on this topic. I’m paraphrasing:

My wife’s great, but the problem is she won’t get a job which leaves her way too much time to sit at home and think of weird shit for us to do. I came home the other day and she said that we should pretend to be strangers and meet somewhere. I said, “OK, how about I’ll go to a bar and you can come in later like, you know, you just came from WORK. And then we’ll have some drinks and you’ll pay because, you know, you just got a check from WORK. And then we’ll go home and we’ll have to go to bed early because, you know, you have to get up for WORK.” She said, “That’s not a fantasy!” And I said, “Hey, that’s MY fantasy, baby.”

Hektor,

Do you understand the difference between defending a personal cost-benefit calculation, as Mrs. Coulter does, that might lead someone with an Ivy League education to interrupt an external career in favor of child raising and the idea that people who make a different decision are immoral, deviant, or necessarily incorrect given his/her personal circumstances?

Nothing in your argument suggests that you.

I’m also puzzled why you think a defense of that decision is a defense of the nuclear family? Yes, it would be nice if advanced industrial societies supported the same patterns of child rearing based on extended families living on agricultural plots, or in quasi-nomadic clans, but they don’t. Advanced industrial societies have well-recognized implications for social relations. Your own comparison with other extant socio-economic situations implies you should be aware of this fact.

So I ask you again, if the “is” of historical social patterns implies an “ought”, why aren’t you out looking for berries or bison rather than typing on a computer under conditions of physical and economic security that, however tenuous, would still be the envy of most human beings?

Even if men were jerks, children KNOW the differences between mom and dad, and mom is always first in demands and in affection.

Heh, no.

Argh…please excuse the typos above. Really, I can spell and write using proper English grammar.

Kieran;

I disagree with you on the need for public funding of childcare. I don’t think it’s a legitimate part of the welfare state – in the way the health care, education and pensions provision are.

Other than that, I’m not really sure why we disagree. I appreciate it could be done and would expand choice for mothers; but I’m not clear on what the justification for such a scheme is. Perhaps you could expand upon this.

“You’re doing the same thing I was complaining about, which is trying to turn the discussion into a debate about whether people ought to make that kind of choice, with me supposedly cast as the person who looks down on them for what they want. From there it’s a short step to a common or garden line about elitists not respecting other people’s decisions.”

Kieran, I certainly agree that your policy position doesn’t entail looking down on these women for the choices they say they want to make.

Your unseemly animus (e.g., oblivious, complacent, free riders,etc.) toward these women, then, was something entirely gratuitous.

Why you made these attacks, whether these attacks reflect some sort of elitist view, and whether these attacks are, rhetorically speaking, helpful or persuasive, are separate questions. I thought it was interesting enough to point out that you had done it, without calling names suggesting I knew why.

“Argh…please excuse the typos above. Really, I can spell and write using proper English grammar.”

I do hope so; for your and for Harvard’s sake. :-)

A predictable, cliche-ridden story where evidence is provided by anecdote, conjecture, and over-stretched analogy.

Move on folks – nothing to see here.

The women in the Times article are adapting themselves, somewhat akin to what girls in high school do when they figure out the social scene. Even though they outperform boys in math and science up to this age level, they surprisingly start doing worse on tests. Have they lost the ability to think? No, they’ve figured out their accomplishments exact a social price they no longer wish to pay. (And maybe this is why many women condescend to men, as one person mentioned–maybe that’s the price the culture exacts from men because women don’t make this calculus without some resentment, even if it’s not expressed directly.) Girls start deferring to boys because they prefer getting dates, being the object of male attention, to outperforming their potential boyfriends. I found it interesting (but sad, too!) that one woman commented that men in her college class think her decision is “sexy.” That is an example of the self-reinforcing experience that she keeps in her mind to support her decision. She takes comfort in having her decision sexualized, so prevalent now.

Look, we want babies, and we know that this culture has decided it’s up to us to set the boundaries for how our families organize themselves. I’ve seem 2-income earners practically kill themselves trying to juggle everything. It’s not each woman’s responsibility to arrange her life to promote political ideology–we all operate as self-seeking individuals. We should focus our attention more on the rigid working structures that make it difficult for both parents to experience both a career and childrearing in a meaningful way, while also recognizing that some couples prefer specialization. I think many girls grow up yearning to have the territory that she sees her mother possessing, as a way of validating her femaleness. Thus, some women’s decision to sacrifice a career may actually be an acting out of other psychological needs.

(Glad to see your comment, Barbara B – I took a class from you some years ago!)

The anxiety expressed in the concept “other people can’t do a good job caring for my child” suggests that these young women have endogenized the widely held notion that quality childcare is hard to find, even if they aren’t expressing it as such. Finding quality care for one’s children is one of the primarily anxieties I hear expressed by working parents. In many areas, getting a spot in a licensed daycare requires that you spend years on a waiting list, with no guarantee that you will even get a spot when you need it (I was shocked to discover that many daycare centers accept people onto their waiting lists who aren’t even pregnant yet!).

“Part of the problem is that child care really IS worse in America than in many other countries, which is partly a public funding problem.”

Since I think most of the women quoted in the story are capable of earning six figures and paying for a nanny if they should choose, I don’t think it’s a question of publicly funded childcare.

I don’t see anything wrong wanting to spend most of one’s life wanting to raise children. That seems to have as much value in it, if not more, than most activities. People here agree with that statement, don’t they? If so the question would seem to be how we can get more people in a position where they are able to make the same choice.

“The anxiety expressed in the concept “other people can’t do a good job caring for my child” suggests that these young women have endogenized the widely held notion that quality childcare is hard to find, even if they aren’t expressing it as such.”

Alternatively, it suggests that they believe that, if somebody else is raising their children, those children will cease to be their’s, every bit as much as if they’d formally adopted them out.

Alternatively, it suggests that they believe that, if somebody else is raising their children, those children will cease to be their’s, every bit as much as if they’d formally adopted them out.

Which if true explains the epidemic of helicopter parenting about which so many colleges are complaining, since this utterly asinine belief that use of child care amounts to “someone else raisng your chidren” arises from an unhealthy emotional dependence on one’s children, whereas the essence of good parenting is to work steadily towards the eventual obsolescence of your role as a parent (the relationship with adult children should be of a quite different kind.)

One other option conflicted young ladies at Yale have is to move to a developing country where child care is deemed necessary for reasons of economic and social strength. In the Dominican Republic, for example, unspoken for grandmothers between 60 and 90 who would otherwise die of poverty or loneliness are given work running child care centers. One thing that worries me about this kind of communitarian ju-jitsu, is communism far behind?

I should note that spending time with a child has many rewards; there are reasons to not want to outsource child care to even wonderful professionals.

Why has no one mentioned the prospects of full time work at home? No small business owners in the CT readership?

When my brother was one and I was T-minus-five months, my father quit his job working for an accounting firm to go into business by himself, working out of an office in the front room of our house.

This wasn’t paradise, for sure, but the rewards were great. I think that the parallels between owning a small business and childrearing are pretty obvious, but I’ll point out a few:

You have a few small people depending on you, as well as a few adults and their families (if you have employees). The buck stops with you; when something needs to be done, you have to make sure it gets done.

After your kids stop keeping you up all night, your work might; and you’re not doing this to please your boss, you’re doing it to survive.

I’ll spare you stories of clients acting like children (yes, handholding, yelling, and screaming, though, to my knowledge, no excreta).

Yes, come the summer, my dad could take off a week or two to go camping with his sons — but from February through April 15, he was as far gone as any Yalie lawyer working 80-hour weeks downtown. But every few hours his kids would come crashing through the door, sometimes with “My brother hit me!!!” and sometimes with, “Can we have your old adding machine tapes to make light sabres out of?”

In case you’re wondering where my mother was all this time: when we were old enough to be left to play in the backyard — which really extended pretty far into our neighborhood — for a few hours, she started managing my father’s office and then doing independent consulting work for other small businesses.

Sacrifices, rewards. And we can’t forget the risks.

The economic pressure toward the division-of-labor/nuclear family model arises from the high return to marginal work in a hierarchical society. Whether or not there is an explicit up-or-out track, most workers do not have the option to freeze their career position, in terms of earnings, prospects and stability, for a number of years. Instead, there is a constant winnowing of the marginally successful, who enjoy much higher compensation, from the marginally less so, who face diminished earnings, prospects and job security.

This hugely affects work/family issues, much more than the simple availability of quality day care. A family that selects the parent with better career prospects and dedicates him or her to working 60 hours a week is likely to do much better than if they share the load and each work 35 hours / week. And, a spouse who withdraws entirely from the work force for a few years to raise kids generally will have to reinvent their career on reentry, with much different options than where they left off.

As per above, I think the fact that it’s generally the man that ends up in the worker role is a result of societal pressure on men to choose careers first on the basis of their earnings potential, whereas women are given more encouragement to follow their interests (on the assumption their careers are just a pre-motherhood diversion). This could clearly be improved to the benefit of both gender roles.

This conversation has too many moving parts for me, but there was this from the article:

A senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class approved of women’s plans to stay home with their children. “A lot of the guys were like, ‘I think that’s really great. One of the guys was like, ‘I think that’s sexy.’

Then they said, “show us your boobs!”

Just in case any women in their early or middle twenties who want to raise a family but continue working their remunerative, satisfying and demanding jobs are reading this, I would make a great house-husband and stay-at-home dad. Email me.

From jr’s excellent comment in #63:

Part of the problem is that high-status Americans work longer and longer hours at their jobs, making the “division of labor” plan where only one partner actually uses his education for a full, serious job start to look like the only available path.

I think it’s a huge part of the problem. It’s been interesting to see how many commenters here simply take for granted that a 60-hour work week is a reasonable expectation for anyone looking for a “successful” career. Being one of those peculiar ducks (peculiar in American society, at least) who works to live, rather than vice versa, I find the relative absence from this discussion (apart from jr, of course) of any consideration of the continual upward trend of work demands in the US speaks volumes.

…and of course none of these young women will ever, ever get divorced…

uncle kvetch, that’s exactly why I now consider my abortive academic career a huge blessing in disguise; in my current job running a small county forensic DNA lab I almost never work more than my standard 40 hour week apart from fairly rare after-hours calls to crime scenes. (I interviewed in the past at some commercial labs and was absolutely appalled at the ridiculous hours people worked, and for hardly any more money than I make now.) That’s what makes it possible for me to be an effective single parent and also pursue my avocational interests. And since the job also gives me considerable psychic income, I consider myself thoroughly spoiled and I’m acutely aware that not many people have it so good. Which is why the whining of the overprivileged so often “reported” in yuppie house organs like the NY Times irritates the hell out of me.

What nobody defending women who take of their kids? Cowards.

Okay. Kiernan says that it’s fine for these women to stay at home; they’ll have rich husbands. But what about all the poor mothers who have to work?

My answer: Well, more women and men should have the opportunity to raise their own children if that is what they want to do. Subsidize parental care instead of childcare.

And I agree with Kiernan, that women alone shouldn’t be burdened with these work-life issues, but we are. Don’t see why he’s blaming the victim for that one.

Just as Kiernan sees an underlying judgments about working women in the NY Times article, I see an underlying judgment in his post against women who stay at home. He writes, And on the resources/power side you have to ignore all the things that make it possible in the first place for smart, highly-educated people to cheerily plan on being out of the workforce in ten years having a grand time at home with the children.

Man, you’ve got no clue. Raising kids is work. Say it with me. Raising kids is work. It is rewarding work. Much more rewarding than 99% of the other jobs out there. But it is work. To portray raising kids as a rich person’s way to loll away the time is uninformed and rude. Women shouldn’t have to apologize to anyone for raising their own kids.

More here.

Laura, read posts 21 and 22 re: “a grand time at home with the children.”

“A senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class approved of women’s plans to stay home with their children. “A lot of the guys were like, ‘I think that’s really great. One of the guys was like, ‘I think that’s sexy.’

Then they said, “show us your boobs!”
Posted by luci phyrr ”

The girls then said to their suitors “show us the money!”

For goodness sake – some of the interpretations of what Kieran is “really” saying here about the politics of childcare are off the wall. He’s explicitly and repeatedly made it clear that he’s _not_ condemning the women who have chosen to stay at home with the kids. Instead, he’s talking about the institutions which structure this choice. Read this earlier “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/09/03/minding-the-kids/ for background. You’re reading something into what he’s saying that manifestly isn’t there. Mrs Coulter – is it really offensive to remark that people who haven’t had kids yet tend to have an idealized impression of what it’s going to involve? As a soon-to-be-parent myself, the one thing I’ve heard repeatedly from everyone who already has kids is that it’s simply impossible to understand how much work and disruption to your life they cause. And isn’t it true that this depends on class? While it involves real sacrifices, even if you’re in the middle class, it simply isn’t an option for many women who either don’t have a husband/partner with sufficient income, or don’t have a husband/partner at all. Which is part of Kieran’s point. This isn’t an offensive statement. It isn’t a lifestyle judgement. It’s what I understand to be a more or less factual statement. I really think you’re getting the wrong end of the stick here.

Mrs. Coulter,

I still haven’t seen a reasonable defense of why you like what you are doing. If it is so terrible and such hard work and you worry so much about the exploited daycare workers, there is a simple solution. You go out, get a reasonably paid job, and pay your nanny at far above the market rates, say $30+/hour. No one is forcing you to exploit daycare workers if you don’t want to. I dare say that if you paid a nanny rates like that, you would get an exceptional one who would care for your child extremely well.

“The reality of modern life” of which you speak is that most of us can’t afford to support a spouse who stays home, earns no money, and looks after a child or two. Your choice is simply not available to most people, and won’t really be available to you if your husband loses his job or divorces you for someone who also works for pay because he is sick of working long hours to support you. So most people must “outsource” their child care either for pay or to relatives, even in our modern “post-industrial” society.

Dan Nexon,

Yes, I do understand the difference. But Coulter presents her argument as largely to avoid oppressing other women. There’s an easy way around that – pay your nanny more.

I was a recruiter for a time.

I had a lot of women come in after the divorce, with little to no work experience and twenty years as a homemaker, and do you know what you can do with a degree after twenty years out of the workforce?

Not very much, no matter where it is from, at least in this area.

These women are setting themselves up for a disaster when the little playmate they’ve chosen to fund their lifestyle opts out of the game. And yes, I am criticising the choice to stay home with the children. It is a dangerous one, not only for the women but for their children. It is a foolish thing to depend on another person for your food and shelter.

Perhaps that makes me a bad feminist, but I had to hand tissues to too many weeping women in my office over the years.

Kieran, your choice of words and your characterizations of the young women in question is at odds with the rest of your comments. I think Laura has a very valid point.

Hektor, you fail to comprehend my argument at all. Have you done the math? Most women can’t afford to pay a childcare worker $30 per hour, plus overtime, since if you are working a 40 hour week, you are going to be out of the house (commuting time, don’t forget) for at least 45 hours per week. Assuming that I’m a good employer and give my domestic employee paid vacations and the overtime she is legally entitled to, she would be paid nearly $70,000 per year. Now that’s putting some real value on childcare. Is it worth saving $70,000 for me to provide my own childcare? Oh yeah, you bet. It’s a hell of a two-income family who can afford that.

“For the nth time, it’s not the individual choices that are the issue”

Kieran, if you call someone a free rider, that certainly suggests a criticism of more than just the arrangements that might allow them to free ride. Criticizing free riding is criticizing individual choices, isn’t it?

as I said above, they are basically fantasizing about early retirement

Except their early retirement is not based on a fantasy about inventing the next Microsoft, winning the lottery, or discovering a cure for cancer–it’s based on the idea that they can marry a man who will pay the bills while they are at home. That’s a far more attainable goal than most get-rich-quick schemes, and that’s why it’s so seductive.

Thomas, high-achieving 18-and-19-year-old Ivy Leaguers don’t realize that investment banking sucks. Seriously, they don’t have a clue. The poor suckers spend a great chunk of their college experience angling for that perfect and oh-so-important job at Goldman Sachs, which curiously involves working 100 hours a week, most of it seemingly sitting around until 1 AM to begin to put together a PowerPoint presentation — but most of them don’t realize this until they get there. Trust me.

You’re probably right that I’m being a little too harsh in my rhetoric about these kids. My main point is simply that a lot of people face similar challenges and don’t have similar options available to them, hence my comments. If my main point was that staying home to raise kids is underrated by society (also true I think), my rhetoric would probably shift to something like yours.

I think there’s a lot of debate going here between people who don’t necessarily disagree with each other. Rather, different elements of the NYT article jump out at them, and this seems to create some unnecessary conflict.

But to address thomas’s objections a little more concretely:

The absurd suggestion that young women contacted by the Times are “pontificating” when asked questions about their future plans?

Yes, it’s totally absurd to suggest that an 18-year-old Harvard student has an overly optimistic and detailed view of what life will be like ten years from now.

That there’s some tension between going to Harvard and choosing to be a stay-at-home mother (“even though”!)?

Yes, it’s totally absurd to describe the New York Times article as being motivated by the tension between Ivy League careerism and the desire of young women to be stay-at-homes. What was I thinking? Do I even know how to read?

The suggestion that the typical career options chosen by high-achieving Ivy Leaguers involve having a “grand old time”? (Isn’t this investment banking grand?

High-achieving Ivy Leaguers typically choose career options based on status. Even though they plan on not fully pursuing careers, the women described by the article don’t seem that different. They obviously plan to marry a high-earning husband, for one thing. Or perhaps they haven’t really thought about how much money is needed to raise a family.

The bizarre assertion that parenting full-time is equivalent to “early retirement”

I’m not sure how else to describe being financially secure at age 35 without working for a living.

Kieran,

I’m trying to understand the institutional structures that would allow all women (and men)the same option that these women are choosing.

If, as you state, you are not showing a preference for women working over women not working, and at the same time stating that its the institutions not the indiviudal choices that matter, isn’t incumbent on you to illustrate the institutions that would allow all women to stay at home.

I can imagine some: government payments to all women, paternity support laws requiring higher levels of support for children, considerably larger tax breaks for one income parent families.

Are these the type of structures you have in mind?

Or are only structures that presume that women will be in paid employment when not rearing children under consideration?

Also, the notion that most one-income, two parent families with children are wealthy is wildly off the mark. The median income of families with 2 or more children where only the husband worked was $49,079 in the 2000 census compared to an average of $67,524 where the wife also worked and $71,653 where the wife worked full time. The average male full time worker for the same period made $50,557.

In other words, the roughly 25% of households with two or more children that only have one earner, are families with average male workers but below average income.

Furthermore, a very high percentage (81%), of high income households (100k+) have two or more earners.

It seems to me that the economic institutions are doing just fine (i.e. work more, make more) and that options do exist for a broad segment of the population, albeit with a lower economic status.

Furthermore, in terms of freedom, the most unfree are the children: no choice as to existence, no choice as to parent, little choice over primary caregiver, no vote in the political system, etc.

What institutions do you propose be created to remedy this unfreedom and create a better child/parent balance and bind the parents to the wishes of the child?

It seems to me that the economic institutions are doing just fine (i.e. work more, make more) and that options do exist for a broad segment of the population, albeit with a lower economic status.

This is a two Americas question. It’s just not possible in most of the prosperous sections of the US to live well on $49 K with two kids. In the NYC metro area, $49 K drops you into the struggling classes (poor housing, especially poor schooling…)

$49K might be OK in Memphis. But not in NYC, Boston, DC, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Miami, etc…

(And, preemptively – no it’s not always possible / desirable to relocate to a behind the curve area…)

2 bedroom apartments in Brooklyn sell for $800,000 today. Starter homes in NJ are not so far off that pace… In the rust-belt city where I currently live, you can buy a very, very nice house for $200 K.

This makes all the difference in the 1/2 working parent equation.

I’d love to see the distribution of $49 K single earner families on a map….

Mrs. Coulter,

That’s the whole point. If $30/hour is too much, even $20 or $15 is a good wage by child care standards. You’re right that most people can’t afford it, but my whole point was that most people can’t afford for one spouse to earn no money. Since in your situation you obviously can afford that, assuming you could then get a reasonably remunerative job, you could afford to pay a nanny a non-exploitative wage. So why aren’t you doing that? The only explanation I can see is that the whole exploiting the underclass angle is not the main factor. What is the main factor for you?

Hektor Bim, you still don’t get it. Most women couldn’t afford to pay your “generous” $20 or $15 an hour (even if it included the nanny’s taxes and health insurance). The point is that generally a mother of moderate income has to either squeeze her help or compromise on childcare quality in order to net anything. Oh, and by the way, in our area, the going rate for nannies is around $500 a week take-home pay, with taxes and medical insurance on top of that. So a lot of middle class mothers would come out ahead if they stayed home with their own child and took in somebody else’s child a few times a week. When I do that, I make $13 an hour with no need to pay for childcare. I’m not going to get rich on that, but it pays for an awful lot of Cheerios. Likewise, morning preschool in my neighborhood starts at about $5500 a year. My family is economizing this year by sending our preschooler to the city co-op for the grand total of about $700 (about $4 a day for three hours).

Hektor,

You’re really not making sense at all. Really. Give it up. If you’re whole point is that some people can’t afford for one spouse to earn no money: no shit, really? Are you even reading Mrs. Coulter’s posts?

Maybe in your world earning sufficient money to pay someone $35K, plus payroll taxes and benefits, to raise your child is a simple matter. Let’s say Mrs. Coulter could drop what she was doing and earn $75K a year (if you think this is “no sweat” from someone with an Ivy League degree, you’re even more pathetically ignorant than you seem from your other comments). After taxes, transportation, and other costs of working she would net a tiny marginal income. My own back of the envelope calculations suggest, in fact, that she might even lose money on the transaction.

And for what? Simply to avoid seeing her child for 40+ hours a week?

Why do you hate women?

Crystal,

Plenty of families live in New York, DC, and other major cities on less than 47K a year. They don’t live at the standard of living you might find minimally acceptable, but they don’t live so terribly as you might imagine. I agree with the thrust of your post, but be careful about class bias here.

(Sorry about the double post)

Dan Nexon,

Your computation is unfortunately limited to the present year. You are ignoring the quite real economic cost to being out of the work force. People can’t just drop out of work for five years and expect to jump back in when the kids are in school and make anything like what they would make if they had been working the whole time. You lose any raises, experience, contacts, and Social Security and 401K benefits you might have had. The current estimate is that having a child costs a woman a significant amount in lifetime earnings if she stays home for a significant period to care for her children. I’ve seen estimates up to a million dollars.

My point is that Mrs. Coulter has presented herself as a selfless sacrificer who refuses to have a job and pay for child care because it is exploitative. But she complains about how hard it is to take care of children. You can’t have it both ways. If child care is really so thankless, then there is an easy escape – get a job and pay for day care, and if you don’t want to exploit people, pay them more. This suggests to me that Mrs. Coulter actually has other motivations for staying home that she is not sharing with us, effectively hiding behind the “think of the poor, oppressed daycare workers”.

Notice how not only are they dealing with a minority of a small minority of elite females, but turning the story around to make it seem much more than it actually is, via the headline.

Well, I suppose it’s a step up from the days when Andrew Sullivan would “explain” gender differences (and shut those pomo types up once and for all) on the basis of something that happened to him at the bar the other night. But not a big step.

It’s been said several times in this thread, but it bears repeating: this is the classic NYT “lifestyle” piece–the words and deeds of a sliver of upper-/upper-middle-class America is blithely extrapolated to some profound sea change in societal mores. And at least once a year, the sea change in question is The Death Knell for Feminism.

Given that this these are the folks who bring us the armchair sociology of Bobo Brooks, it’s really not surprising. But it is disheartening.

“My point is that Mrs. Coulter has presented herself as a selfless sacrificer who refuses to have a job and pay for child care because it is exploitative.”

Then you fail reading comprehension as well as math.

You can flail about long-term opportunity costs all you want, but if one can’t afford to pay the rates you suggest on a year-to-year basis, that doesn’t matter very much, now does it? I assume you know why poor and lower-middle class people rent, even though it is a raw economic deal. Same issue.

My wife made the same choice as Mrs. Coulter. I cannot possibly imagine how we would pay our most basic bills in the scenario you describe… and I repeat: for what possible benefit?

Mythago:

Versions of that still take place — where women are constructively dismissed by working conditions that essentially make it impossible for them to continue.

One relative of mine had to give up her job as a nurse as the hospital decided to take away the dedicated night shift staff and instead make night-working compulsory for all staff.

The effect, essentially, was that in one fell swoop they lost all of their single mothers — or at least those that didn’t live near other relatives — since overnight child care is more or less impossible to get.

This article reminds me of the Stephanie Brown article from last year. Remember “Men are biologically programmed to want subordinate wives?” A researcher at the University of Michigan named Stephanie Brown, and her cohorts, interviewed a couple hundred U of Mich students on whether they’d want to marry their boss or their secretary. When most of the boys answered “I want to marry the secretary” Brown and Co. concluded that “the human race” was “hardwired” to prefer male-breadwinner marriages. The media, of course, just ate this up. One is tempted to quote Mark Twain on lies, damn lies and statistics but this kind of neo-conservative, ev-psych stuff is what the media loves these days.

I’m surprised that the ev-psych types haven’t been all over this latest article like a cheap suit, but give it time.

On a more materialist note, I wonder how much of this beating of the drum for women to stay home is related to the tight job market? Rosie the Riveter was sent packing after WWII because men “needed” the jobs. Perhaps this push for stay-home motherhood, especially on the part of women who could potentially fill plum jobs, is not so much a conscious backlash against feminist gains so much as a way to lower the competition for good jobs in an increasingly tight market.

Until you have any experience of people in that situation it’s
difficult to comprehend the tight-fisted, money-grabbing, scum-like
behaviour that the wealthy can actually engage in. While my wife’s
employers were generally OK, I could spend hours detailing horror
stories from her friends of exploitation and needless penny-pinching
on the part of the people employing mostly young vulnerable women from
Central and Eastern Europe to look after their children. Mistreating
the ‘help’, or least being blithely unaware of the ways in which
their behaviour towards them is unacceptable, seems the norm rather
than the exception.

This was the main point of many of the essays in “Global Woman :
Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy,” Hochschild and
Ehrenreich, eds., (Holt, 2002). Child-care workers receive low wages,
often receive no benefits, and, in the case of immigrants, can be
treated as slaves with their passports confiscated if they are legal
immigrants and threatened with deportation if they are not legal. What
is extremely irritating about a lot of the discussion of this article
(and the NYT article itself) is the rhetoric of choice that appears in
it. Somehow, the whole idea that women are completely responsible for
childcare and the decisions about childcare, and that it is a choice
not made under coercion has firmly taken root in the US and will not
die. Thus, Mrs. Coulter (even in her own words) is staying home for
the sake of her children or for the sake of the exploited child-care
workers (I’m not sure which) as opposed to she is staying home because
the last time the US even considered a law providing federal funding
for childcare was 1971 (goddamn, we miss you Walter Mondale!) which
passed congress but was vetoed by the president (Richard Nixon,
wherever you are, I hope you are in excruciating pain!). I don’t know
what kind of a choice it is supposed to be–either be an unpaid
nanny/housekeeper/mistress to one man in return for room and board and
risk old-age poverty from having been out of the labor force, the
social security system, and any pension or retirement account
contributions; or scramble around constantly one step from child-care
disaster with always full day care centers that can’t provide even
rudimentary medical care (common in World War II era daycare centers),
in-house babysitters, and the goodwill of various relatives.

In my more fanciful moments, I picture kings and lords upon a dais,
watching the spectacle of parents attacking one another over the
pathetically miniscule spoils ($500 tax credits, FMLA of 1993) as
kings of old would watch the beggars sack the wall of food as part of
carneval festivities, and laughing heartily. Somewhere, somehow,
parents (and some nonparents) have been convinced to waste energy and
time calling one another names and attacking one another’s lifestyles
as opposed to trying to better our sorry-ass lot.

But first I must confess: Hektor Bim is my husband. (And whatever Dan Nexon says, he is a terrific husband and father and
a better feminist than any other man I have met.) We have an infant daughter. He works full time in the corporate
world while I am a full-time graduate student (a reverse of the
arrangement we had a few years ago where I worked full time in the
corporate world and he went to graduate school full time). He shells
out $1200/month for daycare and $18/hour for babysitting not during
9-to-5 hours (because my whopping TA stipend doesn’t go far toward
this). And he is desperately negotiating the vagaries of a ridiculously
old-school, male-dominated company where he received no parental leave
(because he had been there less than 12 months, the damn cheapskates),
where he was called at home and asked to come into work two weeks
after our child was born (for which he was taking his vacation time),
where he was sent to a meeting out of state six weeks after our child
was born, and, when he became elegible for parental leave, had to ask
a manager whose only reponse was “I don’t know how to do that.”
(Illegal, yes, but what is Hektor going to do? If he gets fired his wife
and child will be in desperate straits.) And all the while he gets to
hear from smug colleagues who have stay-at-home wives who brag about
having returned to work the week after the birth of a child and offer
such helpful advice as “Make sure your wife is breastfeeding right
away. That way, you never have to get up in the middle of the night.”

As for the smug (and mathematically impaired) posters (Yes, you Dan) who have oh so
cleverly pointed out that a middle-class woman might lose money on
hiring childcare, you are just plain wrong. A college-educated woman
does lose more for being out of the labor force than paying for
childcare. I really don’t need to summarize-it’s been published many
places but feel free to read Ann Crittenden’s “The Price of
Motherhood” if you don’t believe me. And, as many other posters have
noted, low-income women don’t have the option of leaving the paid
labor force at all (which is the real dirty secret in all of this
useless “choice” rhetoric).

Mrs. Coulter, if you did not burst into tears looking at your social
security statement from the years you were (are) out of the paid labor
force you are a stronger woman than I am. All that work of wiping shit
of someone else’s butt is worth NOTHING! NOTHING AT ALL! NO WAGES FOR
YOU! NO SOCIAL SECURITY WHEN YOU GET OLD! (Muahahahah!)

Finally, at the risk of contradicting my previous paragraph about how
parents shouldn’t fight with each other, I do have to agree with my
husband that staying at home with children for no wages in the absence
of social pressures and coercive fiscal policies is not a valid
lifestyle choice–it is a form of union-breaking. It is not in any way
feminist to say that childcare is worthless and should be done for
free, and women who are willing to do it for free by choice (and not
by necessity) should be treated as scabs and/or antifeminist corporate
stooges. Saying that child-care workers are underpaid bacause women’s
work is always undervalued misses the economic reality that child-care
workers are underpaid because a certain class of women are willing to
do the work for free and the paid workers can’t compete. (Go ahead,
flame me. I’m covered in spit up so it won’t hurt me at all.:)

Hektor, in continuing to shout that stay-at-home mothers are “freeloading” off their husbands, you are failing to comprehend that those mothers are providing something in the range of $30-$35,000 in childcare to that family (and possibly more if there are multiple children). Yes, there is an opportunity cost in terms of fringe benefits, such as 401k, Social Security, etc. However, would you be shouting about this if the women in question were dropping out of the workforce for a couple of years in order to pursue an advanced degree?

FYI, although I did get married immediately after college, I also entered the workforce immediately after college, and spent the next eight years working to support my husband while he completed graduate school. If he had also gotten a job instead of going to grad school, he would have higher earnings and more retirement savings. As an academic, it is unlikely that he will ever make up for the lost earnings he might have had if he had decided to drop out of grad school and accept an offer to turn a summer consulting job into a permanent full-time job. So did he make the wrong choice? If not, then why is my choice morally inferior to his?

All of life involves cost-benefit calculations, and the evaluation of that cost-benefit calculation varies from person to person. Not everyone has the same preferences, and very often there is no “morally better” set of preferences, just different preferences. Despite your continued insistence, I make no attempt to extend my preferences, which are formed out of my particular set of circumstances, to other people, other than to note that I’m not the only one who has similar preferences. They are not inherently bad or good. Women who work outside the home are not bad mothers. Women who stay home with their kids are not bad wives. There are certainly plenty of women who stay home with their kids who are clearly not good parents, and plenty of women who work outside the home who are terrific parents.

Is anyone’s opinion of this woman changed if I then tell you that I’m black (African-American) and from a blue-collar background? Does it make any difference at all to the sociological implications of the arrangement? What if the father isn’t black?

The key thing isn’t the WASP-iness of the young women (or their Asian-ness), it’s that they are the subject of a New York Times article. Which isn’t their fault.

The women are being criticized as being symbols of a larger trend, not for their individual preferences. The background idea is that high-powered women are going to willingly give up their careers in the future, and the implication is that this means that the family/career dilemma for women is generally fading away through the power of choice. Hence all the comments about the girls being upper-class, 18 and clueless — the context is this larger argument.

Loved your post Helma.

Hoever, the portion about social security was not completley correct. Since it was designed by crusty old liberal men, a person who is married for 10 years becomes permanently entitled to half a benefit(75% when the spouse dies) based on the earnings of their spouse even if they didn’t earn a dime, ever.

Not only that but should hubby die, they can get a 100% pension immediatley if they are not working and caring for a child under age 16.

Paternalists are nothing if not paternalistic.

Dan writes:
by that logic, makes me the enemy of all taxicab drivers for taking my own car to work,

No, if you sat on the corner in your car where taxicab drivers are waiting to take people to work and said “I’ll take you to work for free! And pay for all my own gasoline and car insurance and you don’t have to do anything! you would be.

all typists for writing my own papers,

Again, if you joined a secretarial service and offered your services for free, including buying all your own computer equipment (because you just like typing), you would be.

all personal trainers for designing (poorly) my own workouts.

I do hope you’ve gotten the point by now. You are fond of throwing around accusations about lack of comprehension.

As for the ad hominem attack on me and my pursuit of a graduate degree: my industry went through massive consolidation and I have been a freelance consultant with dimishing hours for four years and make more money in graduate school than I do elsewhere. Perhaps you could read your earlier post about how an Ivy league degree doesn’t net a job paying $75,000 a year? A graduate degree is an investment in addition to its other perks, which yes, I know are available to a small minority only (see the brilliant article I’m going to write sometime when I’m not balancing caring for my infant daughter with freelance consulting and full-time graduate school on how higher education should be free).

I didn’t attack Mrs. Coulter’s lifestyle–I pointed out that it isn’t really a “choice” when childcare options are so few and far between. What I did say is that treating childcare as if it is not real work and should be done for free
is immoral. And, thanks to you defending it as a lifestyle “choice,” federally funded childcare is a joke.

if your husband is right, why the heck are you in graduate school and not earning as much money as you can to pay a 40+ hour-a-week childcare professional $15-30 an hour, plus fringe?

I’m sorry, but you used the words “unmitigated gall” for me? You are right, you really shouldn’t. Any reading of that is an attack on me for daring to go to graduate school, as opposed to me attacking you for not being able to add.

You can flail about long-term opportunity costs all you want

Any reading of this is you saying “You are wrong.”

I wonder how many single moms will be further squeezed out of quality childcare by your decision?

What does that mean? None. As you say, the labor market is slack and the cost of childcare isn’t something I’m driving up by speculation, like, say, the housing market. If you want to attack me more please send email to helmabim@comcast.net since your tone is really not appropriate for a public webpage.

Back to the NYT. The problem with the article was that it presented what a small sample of women said without asking why they made those choices. Contrast this with the Lisa Belkin article in the magazine, where she actually interviewed the women and found out that most of them had some major crisis where their professional and family lives had come into conflict and they had chosen to care for their families over their future professional development. As Kieran and several other people have already pointed out, this isn’t something that people need to be asked to do in order for the world to keep going. Other countries have made childcare affordable and available (Sweden, Norway, France) and haven’t destroyed their industries doing it.

A quick question:

Why do these women want to go to professional school? Why not stop with a nice B.A. from Yale, Amherst, or the like?

I can understand that an undergrad degree teaches us to become better citizens, more informed, etc. But isn’t a professional degree supposed to help one advance in terms of a profession? Of course, not everyone who goes to law school, say, has to practice law – there are many other trajectories that can be enhanced by legal training – but, what does a JD offer to a parent-in-training?

Or is an elite grad degree the new sine qua non for a marriageable upper middle class female?

“I think most marriage is legalized prostitution”

Can’t speak from personal experience but from what I’ve heard and been told, on average, I don’t think there’s that much sex going on in them things, relative to other forms of binary social relationships, like, say, datin’. Which means that both parties would probably be better of switching to the prostitution of the plain ol’ illegal type. The fact that most don’t, suggests that people get hitched for other, nobler reasons, than sex and money. Raisin’ rugrats and twue wuv come to mind.

Helma and Hektor,

I have you say that you are very lucky to be in a financial position where one spouse earns enough money to pay for the other to be in school *and* to pay for full-time daycare. I wish that we were in a similar position, but we are not. That is one reason why it will take me four years to finish a graduate degree that should take me only two. But you have to work with the circumstances that life deals to you, not what you wish it would be. I suppose I could have married someone with a highly paid corporate job, but instead I fell in love with a lowly Ph.D student. If you haven’t noticed, an assistant professor’s salary is rather meagre. We are both Ivy grads, so you should note that an Ivy degree is not a guarantee of a six-figure salary.

However, I don’t believe that I am depressing the wages of childcare workers by providing childcare for my own child. Nor does your example of the taxi driver offering free rides apply, if you think carefully about the argument. I do not babysit for other people’s children for free. Furthermore, if this were the case, then the same would apply to free childcare provided by a stay-at-home father or by members of the extended family, which Hektor previously recommended as a better solution to the childcare question than a parent providing childcare. In real terms, the cost of childcare to my family is equivalent to the income that I am choosing to forego by providing it for myself. Remember, that I’m not competing with you for a job (at least right now), so if it makes you feel better, I am driving up your earning potential by making the workforce that much smaller. Would you raise the same objections if my husband were planning to provide childcare rather than me? Too bad his employer turned down his paternity leave request, or that’s exactly what would have happened last year.

I also find it highly ironic that you claim that my willingness to provide childcare for “free” (clearly your graduate degree isn’t in economics, or you wouldn’t make that claim) is evidence that I devalue childcare or consider it to be “not real work”. No where in this thread have I said anything that could be construed to mean that I think childcare isn’t real work. In fact, I have said quite the opposite. The notion that well-educated, white collar women demean themselves (I believe you called me a “corporate stooge and scab”) by caring for children, I must say, seems to devalue childcare much more so that my saying that I did a cost-benefit calculation of the cost of childcare vs. the short-term income potential *of my specific situation* and that it came up a bit short.

I have never judged you or any other family who finds that childcare outside the home works better for them. There are certainly plenty of people for whom the intrinsic value of working far outweighs the costs of childcare, even when the second income is not enough to compensate. I’m not sure where you get the idea that I have characterized myself as a paragon of female sacrifice or that I have chosen to provide my own childcare primarily out of concern for exploited childcare workers (a ridiculous and rather amusing strawman, or, perhaps, straw-woman).

That said, I have seen professional, working women discuss whether it’s appropriate for their nanny to eat lunch while the child is awake (workday starts at 7:30, nanny eats at home, and afternoon nap isn’t until 2pm, meaning that nanny is expected to go for 8 hours without food) and wonder if they should pay their nanny less if they take her on vacation with them because she’s getting a free vacation. Not everyone who hires a nanny exploits her, but, I am certainly not the first person to observe that this relationship can be exploitive. The desire of upper-class women to pursue high-powered, intensive careers is often made possible by the low-income labor of other women (nannies, housecleaners, etc.). It is not bad to hire other people to perform domestic labor, but we still have to be aware of the privilege inherent in our decision (the classic formulation of this is “who cares for the nanny’s child?”). Feminists, myself included, can’t just congratulate ourselves on for having wonderful, fulfilling careers, when those wonderful, fulfilling careers are all too commonly built on the backs of women who are paid off the books, get no health benefits, and no overtime. The real problem is that childcare is a reverse pyramid scheme: it has to cost less than the median after-tax wage earned by those who want childcare, or else it isn’t affordable. Upper income women can afford it easily, but for the rest of us, childcare decisions are series of compromises, some more palatable than others. Far, far up-thread, I commented that the availability of affordable, quality childcare (i.e., publicly subsidized) might have changed my own cost-benefit analysis. I wish that our politicians would get off their collective asses and publicly subsidize childcare, but it seems to be so far off the current political agenda that I am certainly not holding my breath.

I would also like to point out that talk of children as “it’s your choice, i shouldn’t be responsible for it” is sickening. It is twisted and wrong to discuss the creation of human life merely as a consumer good, no different in principle from buying a car or pair of shoes. Those of you who implicitly advocate the position that the creation of the next generation of humanity is not a role for society as a whole are demented, disgusting, and bizarre. If there is anything, for love of God, that we should understand involves externalities, it is the direct creation and destruction of human life. Who raised you animals? Milton Friedman?

Or is an elite grad degree the new sine qua non for a marriageable upper middle class female?

Got it in one. There’s far more status to having shut down a wife who had other options.

I just wonder – how many people in this world would choose full time work over being supported? Forget the kids, who, in the deepest recesses of their minds wouldn’t love a world where they didn’t actually have to work? When you’re 18, you think that world might exist. When you’re 30, you realize that a family income of less that $200,000 won’t buy you a comfortable – and I mean “a bedroom for each family member, buy your sneakers at Target” comfortable – lifestyle in NYC. If daddy’s pulling in less than that, mommy’s probably working.

Kieran wrote, “Perhaps more than any other bit of society, opinions about child-rearing are subject to a quite phenomenal amount of endogeneity. People who avail of daycare are likely to think that kids are sociable, robust little things who need a healthy amount of interaction with other children…”

No kidding. Here’s an example of a highly endogenous website that’s vehemently anti-daycare….
http://www.daycaresdontcare.org