Money and Motherhood: some contradictions

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

[Originally published on a weblog called “What Is Liberalism?”]

I’m trying to put together a list of all the ways people are struggling with the issue of money and kids, and the trade-offs of not working. Perhaps you can help me.

Most people believe at least one of the following points, and some believe all four:

1.) People who don’t work are a drain on society.

2.) The value of one’s work is measured with rough accuracy by how much money it brings in.

3.) Women should stay at home with their kids.

4.) The work that women do at home is highly valuable, even though it earns no money.

Many people believe in the first two of these propositions. Some of these don’t believe in #3 (any number of white-collar professionals reject #3), so they don’t have to struggle with point #4. Let’s call this group MIAB (“Money Is Always Best”).

Some people believe in #3 (and some of these are previous MIAB’s who, having had a kid, and having tried to work outside the house, changed their mind about #3). They need to make themselves believe in #4 or they (it can be either the man or the woman or both) will have no respect for the woman until she goes back out to work. I’ll call this group MINAB (“Money Is Not Always Best”).

I’m hardly saying anything new or controversial if I say that believing in #4 is one of the great struggles that people wrestle with nowadays. I see this issue come up constantly among my friends with kids. Any time one of the parents is out of the monetary economy, a strain develops over whether being full-time with the child is worth the loss of money. Occassionally being at home with the child is seen as being a great joy, and either parent is jealous of the other for being home. Following national trends, most of my friends who have had a kid are now no longer living with the person they had the kid with. Many reasons for the break-up are given, but #4 was a factor in every break-up, either as an explicit, concious issue, or a background issue that was never addressed but which had its influence.

Some people want to believe in #4 but find it too much of a contradiction to their other beliefs. Some people think they really do believe in #4 but their actions, at moments of crisis, reveal that, in fact, they don’t. A lucky few have strong ideological or religious backgrounds that make it easy for them to believe in #4. An arrogant few are proud of not believing in #4, while believing the first 3 items. Some families, strapped for money, believe strongly in all four of the above propositions, yet the woman in the family still goes out to work.

We live in a society that has monetized most economic activity so that, unlike 150 years ago, most things of value can be valued in dollars. That which can not be valued in dollars (the joy of raising healthy, happy children, the benefit to society) has to struggle for respect.

More so, all human beings like to feel useful, and like to feel they are doing useful work, but the scope for useful non-monetary work is much more narrow now than it was 150 years ago. A wife on a farm 150 years ago could do a great deal to help production. The modern mom, if she stays outside of the monetary economy, can not.

There has been a trend in our laws and our culture to eliminate special priviledges for the different genders. Both genders now live under a similar legal regime, unlike the year I was born (1967), when women still needed the signature of a husband or lawyer if they wanted to open a mutual fund. (Some might, quite reasonably, argue that we now have quotas for women that we didn’t have the year I was born, but then, we also still have laws that establish men with special priviledges, such as their right to fight in combat and win awards and promotions that are thus closed to women.)

The trend against special statuses based on gender means that most people struggle against the first three or four propositions above. Some of the ideas I’ve heard put forward:

a.) The word “woman” should be changed to “parent”. Why don’t more men stay at home with the kids?

b.) The word “woman” should be changed to “care-giver”. It takes a village to raise a child. Sometimes the best person for watching over a child is the grandparent/next door neighbor/best friend from college/friend who is parent with a kid the same age.

c.) We should have government-sponsored day care so #3 will be less of an issue.

d.) We can pay women (or parents) for being mom’s (or parents), so the issue of non-paid work ceases to exist. (European countries have taken small steps in this direction, though not America.)

e.) We should stop believing in #1. The artist Van Gogh never made a penny, was his life useful? Every life is unique and valuable.

f.) We should stop believing in #2. Belief in #2 is a bad joke – the CEO of Aetna was paid $12 million last year, was his work really worth the work of 400 average Americans? (Attacks on #2 are especially strong in my social circle, which tends to be full of left-of-center political types.)

g.) We should stop believing in #3. This should be part of the larger program of erasing all priviledge based on gender from our laws.

h.) We need a national campaign to convince people that #4 really is true and that society would be better off if everyone believed it.

What have I left out?

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