It was economics that caused me to change a lot of my thinking about mothers, motherhood, and the value of child care. Actually, those ideas had been changing slowly over a long period of time.
But things really got started when I read an article about, of all things, the history of the statistic we know as the Gross National Product, or GDP, in the Financial Times: Has GDP outgrown its use.
The article made several points about what GDP does not include in its calculations and therefore undervalues. In developed countries, in particular the United States, one of the most critical but undervalued contributors to the health of the economy and society overall is uncompensated child care.
Child care and economic recovery
Uncompensated child care is what stay-at-home parents provide. Most commonly it is the mother, but sometimes it is the father, or perhaps the grandparents, another relative, or a family friend.
Uncompensated child care allows one or both parents to work in order to pay the rent, cover health-care costs, and put food on the table. The economy depends on it.
Recovery from the covid-19 crisis depends on getting people back to work, and that depends on child care. Policymakers hoping for a fast economic recovery are just waking up to this fact.
In many cases in the US, desperate parents who can’t count on a relative or friend opt for an illegal solution: they pay cash under the table to a caregiver to avoid paying the Social Security and income taxes that every employer must pay.
And that caregiver receiving the illegal payment is often an immigrant who can’t register for Social Security and work legally without risking deportation. The practice is widespread. Like many immigration laws, it is out of step with economic and social reality.
A recent study based on US Census statistics looked at the child-care arrangements of working families with children under the age of 5. Among the findings:
- There are 9.1 million US families with children under the age of 5, and 55% of them pay for child care.
- These families pay an average of $250 a week for child care. For low-income families, the payments represent 35% of their income.
- 56% of families rely on grandparents for child care at least part of the time.
This last statistic, about grandparent care, is hugely affected by the covid crisis, since older people are much more vulnerable to the disease. In many cases, the grandparents can no longer be the backup caregiver because they are putting themselves at undue risk of contagion.
When schools go virtual because of covid
The child-care worries of working parents become much more complicated when day-care centers and schools shut down because of infections that require quarantine or when teachers can’t teach because they are in at-risk categories.
Some of my university colleagues here in Spain have had to juggle their child-care arrangements because their school-age children were sent home for a variety of covid-related reasons. At least one of the parents has to stay home, which means they can’t teach their classes in person.
The study cited above, by a liberal-leaning organization, concludes: “Child-care affordability should be a central goal for policymakers pursuing an inclusive growth strategy for the American economy–one that provides short-term as well as long-term economic benefits. Lawmakers must act to increase the child-care supply, support child-care workers, and make quality child care affordable for working families.“
Who’s saving us from covid-19?
One of the many discoveries of the covid-19 crisis has been that many of the front-line jobs defined as “essential”–grocery store clerks, nurses, health care workers, social workers, meat packers–are women.
These are people who can’t work from home. They have to take public transit or drive to work. If they don’t work, they don’t get paid and lose their health insurance, if they are lucky enough to have it. And these are the people who are most at risk of getting infected.
A new study by the Brookings Institution, a think tank, found that among the top five occupations with the most exposure to the disease, three of them–nurses, home health care workers, and meat packers–were making less than $12 an hour (the chart is at this link). And many of these jobs are held by immigrants and women (more on this in a podcast from The Indicator on Planet Money).
Measuring the right things
GDP is often used to measure a country’s economic well-being, much like sports analysts evaluate a player by their batting average or points per game. But even sports analysts know that there are many other metrics that have to be taken into account to fairly evaluate a player.
So, economists and policy makers dissatisfied with GDP have developed a field of new metrics called Happiness Economics. These metrics attempt to quantify how effectively policymakers are using their resources to improve the quality of life for their citizens.
One study in this field is the annual World Happiness Report. It ranks countries on GDP but also on how effectively they are performing on quality-of-life measures such as household income, life expectancy, infant mortality, public corruption, public safety, and, yes, individual optimism or pessimism. Just how these rankings are calculated–sources of data, the weight given each factor–is explained in impressively technical detail in the report. The metrics are constantly being revised and updated.
So what is the care and love of a parent worth to society in terms of forming the next generation of contributors to the strength and stability of the community, to the next bearers of the community’s cultural heritage? Whatever that value is, we in the U.S. have not begun to recognize it in our public policies. We need to treat each parent as if they were our own. And that means more than sending them a card and flowers once a year.