The challenges facing mothers are significant and growing. The lingering damage done by the pandemic and some of the subsequent government interventions has left the economy and labor market out of whack, all of which has put issues such as child care and paid leave back front and center.
Paid leave and child care are being discussed as part of Democrats’ potentially massive reconciliation package, a package unlikely to get any Republican support. The package being debated will spend over a trillion dollars on many other issues where there is little bipartisan consensus.
But the data I’ve seen on issues such as paid leave and child care suggest a surprising level of bipartisan concern and hunger for solutions, even if the two parties have very different ideas about how to pursue them.
Over the last two years, I’ve done research for groups such as the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Marshall Plan for Moms to understand where women, particularly conservative women, are at on these issues. The clear message is that these are issues in which the status quo isn’t working and something needs to be done.
Take child care: For one, parents report challenges being able to get child care at all, either because of the high expense or because of a shortage available. Waitlists for day care and so on aren’t a new phenomenon or something brought on by COVID-19, but the pandemic has further exacerbated the issue. The polling found a whopping 44% of mothers with children under age 5 said they had to work less as a result of the pandemic.
At the same time, child care workers are leaving the profession for other better-paying jobs just as mothers and fathers with office jobs may be gearing up to go back to the office. Paying child care workers more could certainly woo some to stay, but then we are back to the problem confronting so many parents in the first place — the inability to afford child care at all. Some 48% of mothers who scaled back their work during COVID-19 but want to return report their biggest challenge is the cost of child care being so high that it isn’t worth it to go back.
Or take paid family leave. Current U.S law grants mothers 12 weeks of unpaid leave. If a woman or her family aren’t able to save up enough to make ends meet for three months without that income, it means having to dive back into work earlier, possibly before physically recovering from giving birth, and certainly before most child care facilities are willing to provide care for a tiny infant.
For some, the ideal is a family that pinches pennies to save while awaiting a newborn so that no rush back to work is necessary, or perhaps a family where there is only one working parent altogether. But that vision is patently unrealistic (or undesirable) for many families. And when it comes to the ability to set aside enough to forgo months of income, it is particularly out of reach for many in the working class. The women who can least afford to sit out the workforce are often also the least likely to be in the kinds of high-paying jobs that offer more generous leave benefits in the first place.
Some conservatives have been hand-wringing about the lower fertility rates in America for a while now. (Taken to extremes, you get Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance’s campaign trail fertility-shaming.) Jonathan Last wrote in his book What To Expect When No One’s Expecting about the problems that come with declining fertility rates in a society, as well as the myriad ways parenting is more expensive and how, at the margins, these costs make some people decide against growing their families.
Republicans are skeptical of heavy-handed government interventions. Setting up government-run day cares holds little appeal, and across our economy, it is the most heavily government-subsidized areas such as higher education and healthcare that see costs dramatically outpace inflation year after year, leaving those things no less expensive for the average.
But it is also clear that doing nothing isn’t a sustainable plan. And it is an area where mothers of all political persuasions are looking for answers. In my poll for EPPC, two-thirds of Republican women and men said they believed some form of paid leave should be available to working parents. Nearly equal numbers of liberal and conservative women — 80% and 78% respectively — say they think mothers share priorities across the political spectrum.
Republican and Democratic mothers might not agree completely on what to do on these issues. Republicans are unlikely to support the reconciliation bill, and Democrats may be reluctant to embrace the ideas Republicans have put forward.
But these issues aren’t going anywhere, and in a divided political environment, it is remarkable to see the kind of cross-party unity we see on the big issues facing mothers today.
