American working families typically spend almost 30 percent of their after-tax income on child care, compared with 10 percent or less in many other Western nations.
It’s Time to Make ‘Women’s Work’ Everyone’s Work
Anne-Marie Slaughter, the author of Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,says that the missing factor in the women’s movement is an emphasis on caregiving policies. Work, for the most part, is stratified into to separate categories: caregiving and breadwinning. Caregiving is traditionally done by women, while breadwinning is men’s work. Despite many progressive milestones, current governmental policies surrounding caregiving still do not move society towards gender equality. “Why haven’t we said that, actually, traditional women’s work is just as important as traditional men’s work?” Slaughter asks in this interview, filmed at this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival. “Both are equally necessary for society…but we value breadwinning so much more than we value caregiving.”
It Takes A Policy
For example, almost all advanced countries provide paid leave from work for new parents. We don’t. Our public expenditure on child care and early education, as a share of income, is near the bottom in international rankings (although if it makes you feel better, we do slightly edge out Estonia.)
In other words, if you judge us by what we do, not what we say, we place very little value on the lives of our children, unless they happen to come from affluent families. Did I mention that parents in the top fifth of U.S. households spend seven times as much on their children as parents in the bottom fifth?
.. Mrs. Clinton would use subsidies and tax credits to limit family spending on child care — which can be more than a third of income — to a maximum of 10 percent. Meanwhile, there would be aid to states and communities that raise child-care workers’ pay, and a variety of other measures to help young children and their parents.
.. When we talk about doing more for children, it’s important to realize that it costs money, but not all that much money. Why? Because there aren’t that many young children at any given time, and it doesn’t take a lot of spending to make a huge difference to their lives.
.. And when someone starts talking about choice, bear in mind that we’re talking about children, who are not in a position to choose whether they’re born into affluent households with plenty of resources or less wealthy families desperately trying to juggle work and child care.