Every society will have its boundaries of permissible dissent. In America today, we don’t give people platforms to advocate chattel slavery or genocide.
Well, add stay-at-home moms to the list of topics we can’t bring up.
That’s made clear in a New York Times piece headlined “In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both.” The central point of this article is important and true: If schools don’t open up, parents can’t just lock their kids in the house, so they will be forced to work from home, which is really hard to do well when you’re also running a home-school academy.
This is quite a problem. All sorts of families are struggling with it. I have friends who work in healthcare who actually sent their children off to live with their cousins. I worked from home, but I literally hid out in the minivan. I have friends who rigidly structured their day to allow both mom and dad to get their work done while minimizing the amount of time Junior was zoning out in front of Paw Patrol.
If schools don’t open or only occasionally open in the fall, it will be a disaster. Some dads will try to care for babies in the afternoon and evening, work the graveyard shift, and sleep mornings, while mom cares for the babies in the morning and works in the afternoon — all while praying the baby sleeps through the night.
There’s one other way I know of to handle things if workplaces reopen but schools don’t. I’ve got plenty of friends who do it: The father works outside the home, while the mo—
“DON’T EVEN SAY IT!” the New York Times writer jumps in.
Of all the strategies parents might deploy to cope with working from home, caring for kids, and managing their school work, there is one in particular that you simply may not suggest.
The New York Times writer, Deb Perelman, laments that some people still hold “a retrograde view that maybe one parent (they mean the mom) shouldn’t be working, that doing so is bad for children, that it’s selfish to pursue financial gains (or solvency, as working parents will tell you). It is a sentiment so deeply woven into our cultural psyche that making the reasonable suggestion that one shouldn’t have to abandon a career or livelihood if offices reopen before schools, day cares and camps do is viewed as a chance to redeliberate this.
“It is not, and you’re off the debate team, too.”
Of course, if the straw man presented here were real, he would be even more obnoxious than the reporters who scold people for walking on the beach. But if Perelman is trying to address any belief expressed these days, it’s clear she’s trying to shush anyone who suggests that some families might be happier if they divided labor so that mom (or dad) did more domestic work and child-rearing labor while the other parent did all or most of the paid work.
Positing that a parent might stay at home is not allowed. To suggest that “financial gains” might be subordinated to time with your children is now “retrograde.” (Hint: If you see the word “retrograde” in a major outlet, that typically means a liberal writer didn’t think he or she even needed an argument against it.)
But Perelman can’t help but brush right up against the notion that maybe, possibly, things would be better for some families if more moms or dads stayed at home.
“We are burned out because we are being rolled over by the wheels of an economy that has bafflingly declared working parents inessential,” she writes.
Funny. Maybe we ought to question why we have an economy and a culture that have bafflingly decided every family needs two incomes.
Governments, tastemakers, and businesses on aggregate made the decision in the United States and Western Europe that mothers should do paid work outside the home, even if their husbands were already doing so.
Universal preschool was created in part to increase mothers’ “attachment” to the workforce. Welfare reform in the 1990s was built around the idea that single mothers ought to work. Many tax laws give preferential treatment to two-income families. Many states subsidize paid child care. Liberal economics journalists lament that when moms stay at home, “We are clearly leaving GDP points on the table.”
These policies, in turn, increase the labor force and probably decreased wages, thus making two wages a necessity for middle-class families who might prefer otherwise.
(Economists will argue that our tax code subsidizes stay-at-home moms because if there were no income tax at all, everyone, including mothers, would have more incentive to work. I am happy to talk about this when the repeal of the 16th Amendment is on the table.)
I agree with Perelman that schools reopening in the fall is crucial to restarting the economy. That fact reflects a somewhat broken system. I just wish our commentators would listen to ideas (to use a nonretrograde term) about economic specialization within marriage.
