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40 / Chapter 3 Unpaid Care Work Suzanne Bianchi, Nancy Folbre, and Douglas Wolf C are for family members is a central feature of the human life cycle. Most of us are tenderly cared for as children and hope to be tenderly cared for in old age. In between, most of us provide some care for family members and friends. Current descriptions of unpaid care work tend to focus on one particular demographic group. In this chapter, we examine unpaid care for children, both healthy and with disabilities, and for adults who need personal assistance (because of age-related or other disabilities), emphasizing the features common to both. We discuss both the economic and health correlates of providing care to others. We focus on three questions. First, how is the social context that surrounds the provision of unpaid care changing? We provide an overview of the historical and demographic factors that affect the supply of unpaid care work from family members , paying particular attention to changes in women’s paid work and changes in the gender division of labor in the home, family structure, and changes in the composition of the population requiring care. Second, how much unpaid care is provided in the United States? We provide an empirical overview of unpaid care provision in the United States, reviewing survey measures from previous studies of the number of hours of care that children and adults receive and the number of hours of care that adults provide. We use the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to derive new estimates of the total amount of unpaid care provided. Third, what are the challenges that families face in providing adequate care for members, and how do these vary by gender, class, and race-ethnicity? Some households have the time or money to attend to family care needs, but the families that need care most are often the least able to provide it. / 41 Unpaid Care Work THE DEMOGRAPHIC CONTEXT Changes in the structure of employment, family composition, age, and health of the U.S. population have affected both the supply of and demand for care over the past fifty years. Three trends are particularly noteworthy: • Women’s participation in paid employment has grown substantially, reducing the number of hours available to women—who have traditionally been the primary caregivers—to provide unpaid care to family members. This has led to an increase in expectations that men should collaborate in the care of both children and the elderly. • Today’s much higher rates of family disruption may have weakened norms of obligation and feelings of emotional attachment. • The combination of fertility decline, the aging of the population, and health trends suggests that the need for unpaid care of adults will increase relative to unpaid care of children. This has implications for both the timing of unpaid care over the life cycle and the relative caregiving roles of women and men. Women’s Employment The increase in women’s labor force participation over the last half of the twentieth century has had a significant impact on provision of unpaid family care (Casper and Bianchi 2002). Mothers and daughters are still on the front lines of caregiving to children and older parents, but the time they allocate to paid and unpaid pursuits has shifted dramatically in recent decades. More children have employed mothers, and more adults engage in paid employment. Time constraints lead to a sometimes frenzied juggling of responsibilities. The employment of mothers with children under age eighteen increased from 45 to 78 percent between 1965 and 2000, with the increase in full-year employment (fifty or more weeks) rising from 19 to 57 percent during the same period (Bianchi and Raley 2005, table 2.2). Mothers’ employment rates leveled off in the late 1990s, causing some to argue that a slowdown or even retrenchment in the trend toward gender equality might be under way in the United States (Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2004; Sayer, Cohen, and Casper 2004), but the current widespread recession has ended the slight increase in “stay-at-home” mothers. The number of mothers who did not work outside the home declined from 5.6 million in 2006 to 5.3 million in 2008.1 Mothers return to work much sooner after the birth of a child today than in the past. Among all women having their first child in the early 1960s, only 10 percent were at work three months after the baby’s birth. Subsequently, this percentage increased dramatically: it...

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