Families at Work: Expanding the Bounds

Part Two: Employment and the Care of Children

109 Part Two Employment and the Care of Children Nowhere has the increased employment of women been more dramatic than among the mothers of young children. A generation ago, in 1970, only 30% of mothers with children under 6 were in the labor force. By 2000, 62% were in the labor force, including 59% of mothers with infants. What happens to children during the hours their parents work? In a few unusual circumstances, mothers work at home or take their children with them, but such circumstances are rare. In other unusual circumstances, fathers have become the primary caretakers for young children, but these circumstances are equally rare. By far the most common responses are either for children to be cared for by others (in a child care center, a provider’s home, or the child’s own home) while the parents are at work or for one of the parents, almost always the mother, to limit her involvement in paid employment. The problems of providing care are particularly difficult for the parents of young children. For school age children, free public education is universally available in the United States, although problems may remain for parents trying to provide beforeand after-school care. In contrast, in the United States—although not in Europe—the care of young children is regarded almost exclusively as the private responsibility of parents themselves. Child care is expensive, and young children especially require high levels of staffing. The consequence is simple: As long as care is privately funded, even if everything possible is done to hold down expenses, the cost of care will be a significant problem for many parents. Moreover, because child care is expensive and because there is little public funding available, those who provide care are poorly paid. The median wage for a child care worker is under $7 an hour, and most receive no health care benefits. The consequence is high turnover, one third of the workforce each year, which lowers the quality of care and makes it more difficult for children to form attachments to their caregivers. In the context of women’s employment and in the absence of institutional frameworks or public policy to support that employment, the presence of children creates new conflicts between work and family. To be sure, there are solutions, but each “solution” comes at a cost. Women can stay home and be full-time mothers, but this reinforces inequalities among families as well as between men and women—even if the family can support itself on one paycheck, which many today cannot. Migrants can leave their children behind, but at an obvious cost to themselves and their children . The affluent can hire full-time nannies, but these nannies may not hold the same values as the parents. If the children spend more time with the nanny than with the mother, as many do, whose culture and values get transmitted? Parents can use relatives to provide care, but doing so may create its own economic dynamic. It may be hard to change arrangements even if the parent decides center-based care would 110 Families at Work be more educational and stimulating. And although parents may think that the problem extends only through the preschool years, they may find that dealing with the work-family conflicts posed by teenage children is at least as challenging. One way that parents can achieve affordable high-quality care is by working different shifts so that their child(ren) can be with a parent at all (or almost all) times. Today, one out of three families with children contains a parent who is working a nonstandard shift, although only a small proportion do so in order to share parenting (Presser, 2000). Francine Deutsch’s article examines those working-class couples who work alternate shifts to share parenting equally. Deutsch shows how these equal sharer fathers, too, cling to some more conventional ideologies. They think of men as the primary breadwinners (even when their wives do more paid work). They claim that mothers work only for the money (in spite of the variety of rewards their wives obtain from their jobs) and that mothers really are the primary parent (regardless of how much time the fathers spend with their children). Nonetheless, in contrast to most fathers, these equal sharers change diapers, give baths, read bedtime stories, and kiss boo-boos. In the process, they become more attached to their children. What others consider biological differences between mothers and fathers, they come to...