Mothers and Children in the US Need Economic Security
By: Peggy O'Mara
Tags: Childcare, Child Tax Credit, Economic Security, Poverty, Mothers And Children

Mothers and Children in the US Need Economic Security

Every day, there’s an article in the media about the “burden” that COVID-19 has put on caregivers, most of them women. Since the start of the pandemic, job losses, additional child care duties and mental distress have all disproportionately affected women. Women with children are more likely to experience emotional distress and non-college educated women have lost the most jobs. According to the National Women’s Law Center, 1.1 million workers dropped out of the labor force when school started in September — 80% of these were women. Nearly half are women of color.

According to Oxfam, “care work is the ‘hidden engine’ that keeps the wheels of our economies, businesses and societies turning.” The organization values this unpaid care work of women and girls at $10.8 trillion annually worldwide, more than three times the size of the global tech industry. In 1995, the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing recommended that governments measure and value this unwaged work and count its value in “satellite accounts” of the gross domestic product (GDP).

Market Solutions

Most of the suggestions about how to help distressed mothers and other caregivers revolve around market solutions, like subsidized childcare, which is needed by many parents, but does nothing to address the needs of the 53 million informal family caregivers who provide care for the elderly and disabled or the 11 million parents who stay at home to care for children.

One “solution” is Melinda Gates’s Holding Co, “a lab to redesign how we care for each other in the 21st century.” In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Gates calls for a White House “czar for caregiving,” who would work with Congress to pass, among other things, a $50 billion plus bill to stabilize the childcare industry.

While her suggestion would help many, including her own company, mothers and other caregivers cannot afford more services from well-funded start-ups if they do not have economic security.

One study referenced by the National Center on Caregiving, for example, concluded that caregiving responsibility falls most heavily on lower-income women: 52% of women caregivers with incomes at or below $35,000 a year spend 20 hours or more each week providing unpaid care. According to the Rosalynn Carter Institute,

Without robust strategies and systems to support America’s already vulnerable informal caregiver community, the health, strength, and resilience of unpaid family caregivers will remain at great risk, with long-term repercussions for our nation’s health, economy, and stability.

What do Mothers Want?

In 2005, “The Motherhood Study: Fresh Insights on Mother’s Attitudes and Concerns” found that mothers reported strikingly high levels of satisfaction with their lives as mothers. In fact, 81% were very satisfied with their overall life as a mother. However, fewer than half of the mothers (48%) reported feeling appreciated most of the time and nearly one in five (19%) said they have felt less valued by society since becoming mothers. One of the key findings of the study was that mothers want more attention paid to their financial security.

Only 16% of mothers across the entire sample said they would prefer full-time work. One in three mothers said they would prefer to work part-time and about 30% said they would prefer to work for pay from home. Overall, a majority of mothers would prefer to be employed — but in positions that do not demand so much of their time.

These findings were echoed by Pew Research in 2010 when they found that women with young children hold conflicting views about working outside the home. Only about 33% of women with young children say that working full time is ideal. For 44%, working part-time is ideal and 19% say not working for pay at all is ideal.

How to Compensate Mothers and other Caregivers

Direct Payments to Mothers. One successful way to support caregivers is with direct payments to mothers. The Magnolia Mother’s Trust, an initiative in Jackson, Mississippi, provides low-income, African-American mothers with $1000 a month for 12 months, no strings attached. The results of this initiative have been outstanding. 100% of the participants said they now had enough money to meet their basic needs. 80% were able to pay their bills and the percentage of those who completed their high school education increased by 22%.

In a recent opinion piece in The Hill, Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, proposed a Marshall Plan for Moms during the first 100 days of the Biden administration. Specifically, she proposes a “means-tested $2,400 monthly payment to the women who are the bedrock of our economy and our society.”

In 1972, Selma James founded the Wages for Housework campaign, which coordinates the Global Women’s Strike. Wages for Housework called for equal pay for all, the right to a guaranteed income, and wages for housework, among other things. Its first campaign was to keep family allowances or child benefits in the hands of women and untethered to a wage earner’s paycheck. As James said in 2020:

It is extraordinary that those who reproduce the human race are still unsupported and impoverished for this fundamental biological and societal work. Unwaged, in a world dominated by money.

Child Allowances or Benefits. Another successful way to support caregivers is with child allowances, which are supported by conservative, liberal and libertarian think tanks. Throughout the entire European Union, in Australia, Argentina and Japan, child allowances help to reduce child poverty and thus increase overall health and levels of education. A few years ago, Canada increased its maximum payment to about $4,800 per child per year (in American dollars), and quickly reduced child poverty by a third. Britain has been paying child allowances since the end of World War II.

The American Family Act (AFA), of which Kamala Harris is a co-sponsor, establishes a fully refundable child allowance by raising the Child Tax Credit to $3600 a year for young children and $3000 for older children. It’s important that child tax credits be fully refundable so that they help, not only those who work, but also those who are underemployed, unemployed, or who are full-time caregivers.

A one-year version of the AFA was included in the HEROES Act, passed by the House of Representatives in May. According to a report from the Century Foundation, a robust child allowance would slash US poverty overall by 42%, lifting over four million children out of poverty, and reduce poverty among Black children by more than half.

In the most comprehensive family policy proposal to date, The Family Fun Pack, Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project recommends a monthly child allowance of $300 per child under 18. He also recommends a home child care allowance equal to the per-child wages of child care workers.

What about Waged Caregivers?

In addition to direct payments to mothers and other informal caregivers, we also need policies that help working families. Only 17% of US workers have access to paid family leave through an employer and the current Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) covers just 60% of employees and is unpaid.

Also, there is no doubt that childcare costs are a significant financial burden for many families. On average nationwide, families spend 10% of their income on childcare. For many families, the cost of childcare is simply out of reach. They need fully refundable tax credits and/or sliding scale subsidies.

Cooperative Models of Care

Families could also benefit from new models of child care like child care worker cooperatives, as reimagined by Capita.

Cooperatives — businesses in which ownership and governance are shared by staff and/or clients — have a long history in the United States and around the globe yet only the tiniest footprint in early childhood. The democratic ownership and governance structure of cooperatives is designed to advance the social, cultural, and economic interests of their members and as such, has significant potential to better support the development and aspirations of historically underpaid child care professionals while delivering better outcomes to the young children in their care.

Another cooperative model for child care is the WePlayCenter, which brings mothers, children, families and educators together for learning and community. Designed by and for the community of New Orleans, this cost effective model “creates supportive learning environments that provide children with quality experiences that promote healthy brain development, appropriate adult-child interactions and positive social-emotional skill.” The center also offers breastfeeding support, postpartum support and parent education, among other services.

Women’s centers are another example of cooperative non-profit ventures that have provided services to women and mothers since the 1970s. The Crossroads Women’s Center in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, for example, helps women with childcare, caregiving and breadwinning, housing and domestic violence, among other things. The center is home to a Breastfeeding Initiative and the Every Mother is a Working Mother Network and has recently launched Caregiving Advocacy for Food and Economic Security (CAFE).

Help All Families Care for their Children

As Meg Conley says in “Motherhood in America is a Multi-Level Marketing Scheme,”

Not every full-time parent would choose caretaking if they had other options. For many parents, accessible care provided by policies like universal child care is the answer. But universal childcare isn’t a universal solution, especially for families that value having a parent at home. Homes with stay-at-home parents deserve the same economic valuation and stability as other working families. We need both accessible childcare and compensation for care in the home.

That’s why Family and Home Network calls for inclusive family policies, policies that help all families regardless of how they take care of their children or earn money. Executive Director, Catherine Myers, says: