Stephanie H. Murray | The Atlantic

‘Commuting Is Bad’—Particularly for Women

2025-12-16T16:34:00-05:00

For all of the professional gains women have made over the past several decades, one stubborn measure of inequality—the gender wage gap—has been especially difficult to stamp out. And it’s a disparity that can be traced in large part to parenthood. In nearly every country on Earth, the arrival of children tends to coincide with a lasting drop in employment and earnings for moms but not dads. Conversations about how to better support working mothers typically focus on family policy, such as subsidized child care and paid parental leave. But one significant factor affecting moms’ employment remains under-discussed: the commute.

This is, admittedly, not a terribly sexy topic. But a growing body of research suggests that whether a mom can hang on to her job comes down to how long it takes her to get there. Notably, the crucial role that travel time plays in shaping maternal employment has been identified not only in the United States but also in countries with far more robust family policies and social safety nets. Commutes also affect women up and down the socioeconomic scale (though in different ways).

The negative influence of the commute is so pronounced that it’s hard to imagine making the economy work for moms without acknowledging its impact. And the solution to the commute penalty may be as daunting as it is simple: To help moms work outside the home, society needs to make it easier for them to work near home.

The commute is, to a great extent, a modern phenomenon. But mobility constraints have been governing the kind of work that women undertake for a long time. Roughly half a century ago, the anthropologist Judith K. Brown observed that throughout history, women gravitated toward jobs with characteristics that made them compatible with child care: They tended not to require “rapt concentration,” were relatively repetitive and easy to interrupt and resume, and didn’t require the woman to stray terribly far from home. In postindustrial societies, many of the requirements Brown cited for making work compatible with child-rearing have become less relevant; women work in all sorts of industries requiring focused concentration, for example. But distance from home—which of course affects commute time—may play a larger role in employment-based gender inequality than ever, as other factors, such as gaps in education between men and women, have declined in significance.

The study that seems to have kicked off much of the research on commutes was published about a decade ago. It found that in U.S. cities with longer average commute times, married women’s workforce-participation rates tended to be lower. A couple of years ago, researchers attempted to replicate the finding with more detailed data, drawn from 272 cities across the country, and found that it held up: A 10-minute increase in average commute time decreases by 4.4 percentage points the probability that married women in the area work. The effect was driven pretty much entirely by moms, rose with the number of children they had, and was bigger for those with younger children. “I think it’s very strong evidence that commuting is bad,” Jordi Jofre-Monseny, a co-author of the study, told me, “but particularly for women.”

[Read: Why parents struggle so much in the world’s richest country]

Even when commuting doesn’t push moms to leave the workforce entirely, it can shape the sorts of jobs they take. One recently published working paper used an unusually rich data set to document the career moves that people make before and after becoming parents. It found that before parenthood, men and women both tend to make steady progress in their career, moving to better-paying companies and to higher-paying jobs within those companies. But after children enter the picture, moms (not dads) start shifting to jobs at lower-paying employers, or to entirely different industries; for instance, moms may move out of finance into health care or education. Mothers seem to be trading lower pay for flexibility or other accommodations, Brenden Timpe, an economics professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and a co-author of the paper, told me. He and his colleagues found that many moms moving to lower-paying employers were opting for jobs with part-time hours, more opportunities for remote work—and shorter commutes.

These findings are not unique to the United States. A 2022 study of data from Belgium found that, as in many other countries, a substantial employment gap opens between men and women after parenthood—largely because moms are so much more likely than dads to leave jobs outside their local area. A study this year, using data from Norway, found that after having a child, mothers reduce their commute time considerably more than fathers do, leaving them with fewer and lower-quality job opportunities. And a paper last year, looking at Germany, found that women’s willingness to sacrifice wages for a shorter commute jumps by 130 percent after they have a child and does not start to decline again until the child reaches age 12.

Collectively, these studies suggest that commuting is a hindrance to employment for moms regardless of their socioeconomic status, but that the manner in which they downshift their career varies. One paper, published in June, found that mothers without a college degree are much more likely than college-educated moms to leave the workforce on account of a long commute. Timpe’s paper, meanwhile, observed that among those moms who remained in the workforce but switched to lower-paying jobs (for benefits such as a shorter commute), the highest-paid took the largest hit. “If you think about people working at, you know, Goldman Sachs, that’s really where you see the biggest drops,” Timpe said. And of course, some moms don’t have the option of leaving the labor market: Another paper found that although commute distance widens the gender wage gap among all moms, the effect is a bit smaller among single moms, who likely have no choice but to carry on working, regardless of how terrible traffic is.

It’s worth spelling out why commuting is such a headache for parents. For one, the longer your commute, the more child care you are likely to need and the less time you get to spend with your kids. But many of the researchers I spoke with for this article believed that the draw of a short commute has less to do with the time people might save in a typical day and more to do with their ability to reliably show up for their kids.

[Read: The remote work–fertility connection]

Getting to day care or school pickup on time is an essential part of the parenting gig; long commutes heighten the risk of something, whether traffic or a train delay, causing a holdup. Even if a child doesn’t need their parent for midday errands or emergencies every day, on any day, they might need a parent: Kids get sick, have a doctor appointment, forget their lunch box, or have an assembly or other event that calls for parents’ presence. “All these activities take time, and they might be increasingly difficult to perform in a situation where just going back and forth from work requires you 45 minutes or one hour,” Ilaria D’Angelis, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a co-author of the June paper, told me. And although the need to reach a child quickly may come up relatively infrequently, Timpe said, “You kind of have to make a huge employment decision based on that.” One parent may end up adjusting or limiting their work to ensure they can stay in proximity to their kids—and statistically speaking, it’s usually the mom.

The long-commute phenomenon might be made less punitive for women if more men were to modify their career to stick close to the kids. But that doesn’t so much solve the problem as redistribute it; if more dads were to take the hit, the commute burden would simply shift to them, rather than helping more parents, whether moms or dads, work higher-paying jobs. One potential fix: Employers could offer flexible hours, or reduce the career-hampering effect of commutes by allowing more employees to work from home. Such flexibility is probably one reason that commuting is less likely to push highly educated women out of the labor market, D’Angelis said; such women generally have a better chance of finding work that can be done remotely. For those without the ability to work from home, efforts to reduce congestion or invest in faster and more reliable public transportation—worthy goals, though much harder to attain—would almost certainly help.

[Read: Cities aren’t built for kids]

Yet another option would be to find ways to enable people to live closer to where they work. One recent study, examining how the commute penalty is linked to the spatial distribution of jobs, found something that is going to sound blindingly obvious but that is worth teasing out: A mom’s preference for a short commute penalizes her only when acting on it means sacrificing a higher-wage opportunity. Consider the finance industry, in which the good jobs are typically concentrated in city centers. Sitian Liu, an economics professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, told me that among financial workers living in U.S. city centers, one doesn’t see much of a gender wage gap or a commute penalty. That makes sense because if you live in the financial district, the need or desire for a short commute has little bearing on women’s ability to access high-paying jobs. Only among finance workers in the suburbs does a large gender commuting gap—and a resulting gender wage gap—emerge.

But things look different in other high-skill, high-paying industries, such as medicine. Balancing work and parenthood as a physician, for instance, is no easy feat, no matter one’s distance from the workplace. Because hospitals and doctors’ offices are more geographically distributed, however, female doctors are less likely than finance workers to be penalized for living in the suburbs, Liu explained; those who decide to live outside the city still have access to high-paying, nearby jobs. Together, these findings point to two ways to minimize the commute penalty: Make it easier for more moms to live closer to existing job hubs—perhaps by building more family-friendly housing in urban centers—or spread the jobs out.

Motherhood will likely always shape women’s involvement in the economy. But the commute-penalty research demonstrates that moms’ ability to work depends greatly on practical, often malleable, aspects of how that work fits into their daily life. When mothers are “in a situation where they can really reconcile their family life with their work life,” D’Angelis said, “they do that.” The task for a society intent on reducing gender pay inequality is to create the conditions where that type of reconciliation is possible.

The Parental-Happiness Fallacy

2025-10-21T11:39:00-04:00

Money is supposed to make life easier. But whether it makes life easier for parents has become a surprisingly contentious question.

A couple of years ago, Pew Research Center published a survey about American parenting that stumbled on a somewhat counterintuitive finding: Lower-income parents were more likely than middle- or higher-income parents to say that they found parenting enjoyable and rewarding “all or most of the time.” The difference was pretty marginal—most parents, regardless of income level, reported finding parenthood enjoyable all or most of the time—but that one data point got people talking. Think pieces proliferated, in which people reflected on why the most disadvantaged parents were “less exhausted and stressed and more rewarded by parenthood,” and why women with more advantages were “the unhappiest mothers,” reporting “the highest levels of dissatisfaction with motherhood.” Simone and Malcolm Collins, the venture capitalists turned pronatalists, hosted a podcast episode on the Pew research, “debunking the bias that poorer people must be miserable raising children” and arguing that “cultural factors like faith and insulation from the childless urban monoculture better enable them to find meaning in parenting.”

But these accounts tended to downplay (or ignore) another important finding in that Pew report: “Lower-income parents are also more likely than those with upper incomes to say parenting is stressful all or most of the time”—and by a much bigger margin. At higher rates than well-off parents, they consistently reported worrying that their children would struggle with anxiety and depression; get bullied, kidnapped, beaten, or shot; struggle with substance abuse; or run into trouble with the law.

That is, even the Pew study contradicted the claims people were making about wealthier moms being the most miserable and stressed. And although some evidence really does suggest that higher-income moms face a certain flavor of stress that lower-income moms do not, quite a bit of the evidence goes in exactly the direction you might expect: Better-off moms are, well, better off.

A more thorough rundown of Pew’s and other data suggests that the question of which moms struggle most in the United States is much more complex than many commentators have asserted. When I reached out to Jennifer Glass, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies family and gender issues, to ask how parental well-being and socioeconomic status interact, she said she does not believe that the evidence supports the idea that wealthy, highly educated parents struggle with parenthood more than lower-income, less-educated ones. “There’s simply no data on mental health, subjective well-being, or happiness that I have ever seen showing this,” Glass told me.

In Glass’s own research on how partnership and higher levels of income and education influence parental well-being, she has found that “all three significantly improve happiness for parents,” she told me. Data that the Institute for Family Studies shared with me likewise suggest that the proportion of mothers who say they are somewhat or completely satisfied with their lives rises in lockstep with their household income. Put another way: Wealthier moms are in fact happier moms.

Things get a bit more complicated when you stop asking which parents are “happiest” and start asking how parenthood affects a person’s well-being. The research on this question is mixed. And pretty much all of the data suffer from the reality that, as any stats teacher will remind you, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. “At the end of the day, we can’t be 100 percent confident that what we are attributing to being a parent is not related to some sort of third variable that we haven’t accounted for,” Jennifer Augustine, a sociology professor at the University of South Carolina who studies inequalities in family well-being, told me.

Researchers do have some evidence suggesting that higher-income parents, and in particular higher-income moms, take a distinct kind of hit to their well-being that lower-income parents don’t—perhaps on account of heightened social pressure to engage in intensive parenting. It’s well established, for example, that although college-educated mothers spend about the same amount of time with their kids as do moms with less education, they spend more of it engaged in “developmentally stimulating” activities such as reading or playing, Ariel Kalil, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, told me. Using data from the American Time Use Survey—which asks respondents what they did the previous day and how they felt while doing it—various researchers have posed this question: Do highly educated moms enjoy focused time with their kids more than lower-educated moms do? The studies took slightly different approaches to testing the question, but their results pointed in the same direction: “The answer is a very precise no,” Kalil told me. If anything, higher-educated moms enjoy it less.

[Read: The isolation of intensive parenting]

Another study, co-written by Augustine, used the same data in a slightly different way, examining how parents of different education levels felt throughout the day compared with how nonparents felt. Building on previous research finding that parenting was “associated with a ‘mixed bag’ of emotions,” with parents experiencing more daily happiness and meaning but also more stress than their nonparent peers, it found that this was true only for highly educated moms. Lower-educated moms did not report higher levels of stress (or happiness) than their child-free counterparts.

A multitude of factors seem to be at play here. “If you go to any playground in any middle-class neighborhood, the No. 1 thing that moms will be talking about—because they’re the ones who are most often at the playground—is what activities their kids are involved in,” Augustine told me. Arranging and managing those activities takes a lot of cognitive energy and carries its own stress. “It’s kind of like more money, more problems,” she said. Highly educated parents are also more likely to have moved away from family in pursuit of educational and professional opportunities, leaving them without nearby grandparents or siblings to help with child care, Daniela Negraia, a behavioral scientist and the other co-author of Augustine’s study, told me. And of course, “the alternatives to parenthood for moms are vastly different by class,” Glass said. For instance, highly educated moms, who are more likely to work white-collar jobs, might have the chance to answer emails in the relative peace of an air-conditioned office and consider that a welcome break from waiting out toddler tantrums. For lower-income moms, who are more likely to work in the service and hospitality industries, “the chaos at the dinner table might be music to your ears,” Glass told me, “compared to the noise and pollution of your worksite, where you might be disrespected or harassed.”

If you are struggling to piece together a simple narrative based on these data points, that makes sense. Each of these analyses measures different things, in different ways. Asking someone how stressed or happy they felt while feeding their toddler yesterday is quite different from asking how stressful they find parenthood in general, or how satisfied they are with their life overall. When you pluck one data point from that Pew study on parenting, it seems to suggest one thing. When you pluck out another, it suggests something else entirely. When you take those points together, along with the broader body of research on class and parenthood, the only clear deduction is that people’s feelings about parenthood are pretty complicated.

And when you compare parents and nonparents using broader indicators? Having money and education starts to look pretty good—or, at least, not bad. Take, for example, this study published in January. Its goal was to figure out whether and how the pandemic affected the so-called parental-happiness gap. Historically, parents have had lower happiness levels than nonparents, at least in the U.S. The study found that by the time the pandemic began, that gap had closed—and no differences emerged in the happiness gap between parents of different education levels. (This changed during the pandemic, when the happiness of nonparents declined more than that of parents, leaving parents with a happiness advantage—perhaps because their children helped to buffer them against isolation, or because the broad expansion of public support for families provided them more of a financial cushion.)

Another recent study, drawing on a survey of 30 European countries, explored the ways in which parenthood is associated with both “life satisfaction” and “meaning in life.” It found that although parenthood is pretty uniformly associated with people feeling a greater sense of meaning, regardless of gender or socioeconomic status, it is linked to lower life satisfaction for women, especially for the most vulnerable ones—young moms, those without a partner, and those with the least education.

[Read: Why parents struggle so much in the world’s richest country]

It may be a little off base to believe that wealthier moms struggle the most with parenthood. But even to the degree that they face unique stressors, this does not mean, as so much commentary on wealthier, stressed-out moms has suggested, that those stressors are of the moms’ own making. No amount of money can buy an American parent out of the reality that they will have to raise kids capable of surviving without much of a social safety net. The conclusion to draw from the struggles of well-off moms is not that they have it harder than other parents or that they’re putting a ridiculous amount of pressure on themselves, but that all parents would benefit from more robust family-friendly policies.

After all, the study based in Europe found that the motherhood life-satisfaction penalty varies considerably by region: In the famously family-friendly Nordic countries, moms report a life-satisfaction bonus. Although parenthood in many places is a trade-off between happiness and meaning, “it doesn’t have to be,” Ansgar Hudde, a professor at the University of Cologne and a co-author of the study, told me. When conditions are broadly supportive, parents can have both.

Bring Back Communal Kid Discipline

2025-05-29T07:30:00-04:00

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On a trip to Prague a couple of years ago, my family piled into a rapidly filling metro car, and I wound up sitting next to my 6-year-old daughter, while her 4-year-old sister sat directly across from us, on her own. At one point, my youngest pulled a knee up to her chest and rested her foot on the seat. Almost immediately, a woman sitting next to her, who looked to be about 70, reached out and gently touched my daughter’s foot, signaling her to put it down. My daughter was surprised, maybe a little embarrassed. But she understood and quickly obeyed.

For a split second, I wondered if I ought to feel chastised: Perhaps the woman was judging me for having failed at some basic parental duty. But something about the matter-of-fact, almost automatic way the woman had intervened reassured me that she wasn’t thinking much about me at all. She was just going through the motions of an ordinary day on the train, in which reminding a child not to put her foot on the seat was a perfectly natural gesture.

Ultimately, I was grateful for the woman’s tap on my daughter’s foot. But the exchange also felt foreign. In my experience, that sort of instruction, from a random adult to a stranger’s child, isn’t much of a thing in America (or, for what it’s worth, in the United Kingdom, where I currently live). Many people don’t seem to think they have the authority to instruct, let alone touch, a kid who isn’t theirs. They tend to leave it to the parent to manage a child’s behavior—or they may silently fume when the parent doesn’t step up.

To informally test that assumption, I created a short online survey and ended up interacting with a dozen people from around the United States. Some were parents; some were not. Every single one said that outside certain situations—where they were familiar with a kid’s parents, or where a child’s safety was in question—they would hesitate before telling someone else’s kid what to do, for fear of upsetting the parent. Marty Sullivan, a technology consultant based in Tennessee, gave a representative answer: “Generally I’d prefer to avoid risking escalation.”

These responses struck me as a bit of a shame, because the exchange between my daughter and the woman in Prague seemed to reflect something altogether good. And I know I can’t be alone in that thought: Both historical precedent and cultural norms in other parts of the world reinforce the idea that a stranger’s meddling in the disciplining of children can have significant merits.

The highly individualistic approach to managing kids’ behavior in public is particularly American—and a historical anomaly. David Lancy, an anthropologist and a professor emeritus at Utah State University, wrote to me that for the majority of human existence, it was unquestionable that “‘the whole village’ participates” in child-rearing. “Siblings, peers, aunts, grandmas,” he told me, “all have distinct roles, including ‘correcting.’”

When I asked Steven Mintz, a historian of families and childhood at the University of Texas at Austin, whether child-rearing in the United States, specifically, had ever involved a more collective approach, he seemed almost tickled: “Did it ever!” he wrote back. He recalled that during his own childhood, in the 1950s, he was “constantly corrected” by people other than his parents for his poor posture, hygiene, grooming, and language. Child-rearing into the first half of the 20th century was, he noted, “far more of a communal and public endeavor”—an approach that entailed a fair amount of what would, by contemporary standards, probably be considered intrusion. “Neighbors, teachers, shopkeepers, and even strangers on the street,” Mintz wrote, “felt empowered, and often morally obligated, to correct a child’s misbehavior, scold a lack of manners, break up a fight, or escort a wandering child back home.”

Today, this sort of “village style” oversight remains a norm in some pockets of the United States. Michelle Peters, a project manager in El Paso, Texas, whose family has roots in Mexico, told me that she has seen communities in both the U.S. and Mexico take a more collective approach to child-rearing. “It is more common and more acceptable for adults to correct children who are not their own,” she said, and people feel “a greater sense of social intimacy and immediacy,” which extends to caregiving in public settings. Yet in much of the United States, Mintz told me, the collective has given way to a “privatized and protected model of parenting.”

[Read: The isolation of intensive parenting]

As in other aspects of parenthood, that closed-off approach gives parents more control but also puts them under more pressure. If you’re the sole arbiter of your child’s public behavior, you have to keep a pretty close eye on your kid at all times. That sense of responsibility can also produce anxiety: Rather than just parenting as I see fit, I often find myself guessing—and second-guessing—whether my kids are bothering people or violating some unspoken rule. (Is my daughter standing way too close to that guy? Does that shopkeeper mind that my kid is flipping through their magazines?) Amy Banta, a mom of three in Salt Lake City, told me that this is one reason she really appreciates it when other people step in to correct her kids. “I cannot anticipate your every boundary that my child might possibly cross,” she said. “You’re gonna have to help me out.”

If the goal is to steadily acquaint children with the conventions of polite society, it isn’t clear that filtering all guidance through parents is the most effective approach. For one thing, kids are smart. A child who knows that his parent or other caregiver is the only one who will ever correct him might reasonably conclude that he can get up to no good whenever that adult turns away. What’s more, I have found that a stranger’s gentle intervention—as opposed to my nagging—can be a more effective means of conveying to my kids that the people around them are real people, with their own needs, whose space and comfort one ought to respect. Another adult’s nudging can function as a kind of “social proof,” as Banta put it—a reinforcement of the lessons a parent is trying to impart.

[Read: A grand experiment in parenthood and friendship]

Banta told me about a time when she took her then-5-year-old to a community-theater performance and he struggled to sit still. “I kept telling him that he couldn’t wiggle in his seat, because he was shaking the whole row,” Banta recalled, but “he didn’t want to listen to me, because he was having so much fun bouncing.” At intermission, another woman in the row asked Banta’s son to stop shaking the seats so much. “I looked at my son and said, ‘See? It’s not just me,’” Banta told me. He was far more mindful of his movements during the second act, periodically checking to see if he was bothering the woman down the row—who gave him a big thumbs-up after the show ended.

The collective approach to correcting kids’ behavior can have its drawbacks, of course. Plenty of people have truly unreasonable expectations about the way kids should act in public. Miranda Rake, a writer and mother of two in Oregon, told me that she thinks tolerance for ordinary kid behavior in much of America is too low. Even in Portland, which she considers quite laid back, she “gets the stink eye” in many places and feels like she’s “on eggshells in a lot of coffee shops and certainly restaurants,” she said. “There just isn’t a culture of community around kids here.” In her view, that complicates the question of whether interventions from nonparents would make the environment more or less family friendly.

Rake’s concern is not entirely unfounded. In the United States, collective supervision of children has typically coincided with community norms that “could be rigid or exclusionary,” Mintz told me, “and the authority of adults could at times be authoritarian or abusive.” Meanwhile, in many modern societies outside America, tolerance for childlike unruliness is part and parcel of the more communal approach to raising kids. (That was also the norm for most of our evolutionary past, Sarah B. Hrdy, an anthropologist who has extensively studied child-rearing dynamics in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, told me. Where instruction does occur in such cultures, it tends to involve subtle, often nonverbal guidance—of the sort I encountered in Prague—rather than scolding or censure.)

[Read: Is it wrong to tell kids to apologize?]

The challenge of balancing tolerance and discipline aside, both Hrdy and Mintz observed that in many ways, American society is simply not set up for a thriving culture of community oversight. Where such a culture once existed, it was propped up by various forms of social infrastructure—the kind that has been steadily hollowed out over the past several decades, Mintz told me. American neighborhoods used to be more tightly knit. A lower proportion of mothers were employed outside the home, which meant that neighborhoods were filled with adults during the day who could keep an eye on one another’s children. A strongly ingrained cultural respect for adult authority meant that “few questioned a neighbor’s right to reprimand a child for rudeness or risk-taking behavior,” Mintz said, and the potential personal risks (legal or otherwise) of disciplining a child not your own were fewer: “Adults could discipline, correct, or even physically intervene without fear of being sued, shamed, or filmed.”

In an era when fewer people know or interact with their neighbors, and social trust has waned, the thought of reviving collective child-rearing norms may seem a little far-fetched. And yet, the Americans I spoke with seemed, on the whole, largely open to being a bit more direct with other people’s kids—if only they could have assurance that such involvement would be welcome. I’ll come out and say it: I would certainly welcome it.

The New Marriage of Unequals

2025-03-31T07:00:00-04:00

Once upon a time, it was fairly common for highly educated men in the United States to marry less-educated women. But beginning in the mid-20th century, as more women started to attend college, marriages seemed to move in a more egalitarian direction, at least in one respect: A greater number of men and women started partnering up with their educational equals. That trend, however, appears to have stalled and even reversed in recent years. Gaps in educational experience among heterosexual couples are growing again. And this time? It’s women who are “marrying down.”

Researchers debate whether marriage between educational equals—homogamy—is on the decline. But one thing is clear: The phenomenon of women marrying men with less education than themselves, what academics call “hypogamy,” is on the rise. In fact, women are now more likely to marry a less-educated man than men are to marry a less-educated woman.

Christine Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, shared data with me on trends in the educational profile of heterosexual married couples from 1940 to 2020. According to her calculations, in 2020, American husbands and wives shared the same broad level of education in 44.5 percent of heterosexual marriages, down from more than 47 percent in the early 2000s. Of the educationally mixed marriages, the majority—62 percent—were hypogamous, up from 39 percent in 1980. Crunching the numbers slightly differently, Benjamin Goldman, an economics professor at Cornell University, found that among Americans born in 1930, 2.3 percent ended up in a marriage where the woman had a four-year degree and the man did not. Among the cohort of those born in 1980, that figure was 9.6 percent. (This trend is hardly unique to the United States; hypogamy is becoming more common all over the globe.)

It’s a fragile time for gender relations in the United States. Young women and men appear to be diverging politically. Fewer people are dating, marrying, or having kids. Some commentators argue that there aren’t enough suitable bachelors to meet the standards of accomplished modern women. Meanwhile, a growing “manosphere” claims that women’s advancement is to blame for all manner of struggles experienced by lonely, unmoored men. Yet for all the worry that a chasm is opening between men and women, the rise in the number of hypogamous couples suggests that some men and women are doing what men and women have always done: coupling up regardless of differences and figuring out a way to get along. “It’s clear,” Goldman told me, “that understanding the dynamics of these couples is key to understanding the future of marriage.”

The rise of the better-educated wife raises all sorts of questions we don’t have complete answers to: What is drawing people to these relationships? Have women’s strides in the labor market given them more latitude to marry whomever they love, or are they just settling? How are these couples dividing paid and unpaid work? Are they happy, or is their unconventional setup a strain? We don’t even know if the couples in these unions are particularly progressive, Nadia Steiber, a sociology professor at the University of Vienna who is leading a multiyear project studying hypogamy, told me. Some people might imagine that women married to less-educated men are über-feminists happy to shirk traditional gender roles. And yet, men with less education tend to hold more traditional views on gender—which could suggest that the highly educated women marrying them also hold, or are at least open to, more traditional views.

For all that remains unknown about the dynamics of hypogamous relationships, a growing body of research suggests that women are indeed marrying less-educated men simply because that’s who is available—not necessarily because of changing preferences. In 2021, about 1.6 million more women than men were enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States, Clara Chambers, a research associate at Yale University, told me. But according to a recent paper she co-authored with Goldman and Joseph Winkelmann of Harvard University, marriage rates among college-educated women have been broadly stable. The explanation for that is fairly straightforward: Without enough college-educated men to go around, college-educated women must be marrying men without a degree. Evidence that the rise of hypogamy is largely a response to these demographic constraints—rather than to, say, women’s economic empowerment, the increase in online dating, or shifts in preferences—has been found in many countries.

[Derek Thompson: Colleges have a guy problem]

Even if shifting norms and preferences aren’t driving the rise of hypogamy, they do seem to be evolving in conjunction with it. The World Values Survey, which explores how values and beliefs vary by country and shift over time, routinely asks people whether they agree that “if a woman earns more money than her husband, it’s almost certain to cause problems.” Schwartz and her research colleagues have found that in countries where women have more education and hypogamy is more prevalent, people are less likely to agree with that statement. And the fact that women and men are coupling up despite their educational gaps indicates that preferences are perhaps more flexible than some people assume. Various studies suggest that “preferences are not this fixed thing,” Schwartz said. People respond “pretty quickly to the availability of partners.”

It’s important not to overstate the change under way here: Educational achievement does not map neatly onto earnings. Some research has found that women in hypogamous marriages, in the United States and abroad, are a bit more likely than other women to earn as much as or more than their husbands, Schwartz told me, but most don’t. Steiber’s research in Austria found that women with more education than their husband took a smaller hit to their earnings after having a child than other Austrian mothers did, but not by much—and that their families still tended to fall into the male-breadwinner pattern after kids entered the picture. That is, women’s educational advantage may draw husbands and wives closer to economic equality—but men still usually have the economic advantage.

[Yascha Mounk: Nothing defines America’s social divide like a college education]

Recent research can help shed light on why this is. When Goldman, Chambers, and Winkelmann looked at how the earnings of non-college-educated men have fared over the past several decades, they found that men married to college-educated women have done comparatively well for themselves; their earnings have gone up a bit over time, even after accounting for inflation. But the earnings of non-college-educated men who aren’t “marrying up” have dwindled considerably. In other words, college-educated women are partnering up with the highest-earning men without degrees, Goldman said. “The remainder of non-college men are really struggling.”

The persistence of men’s tendency to outearn their wives was evident in conversations I had with people in hypogamous relationships from around the country. In some cases, I spoke with both partners, and in others I spoke only with the wife. The extent of the couples’ educational gap varied—but the man was the breadwinner in most of these relationships. For instance, Mitchell Self, who lives in central California, has been with his wife, Mary, since high school. He did farm labor for a while after graduation, then transitioned into welding and founded his own company. Mary attended a nearby college and graduated with a degree in geospatial studies. She’s now caring for their two young children full-time, and while she’s glad to have a degree, she doesn’t think she’ll ever be the breadwinner in their marriage. “He will always be able to make a lot more money than I could ever make,” she said.

Some couples I spoke with told me that the husband’s income was what had allowed the wife to pursue her education in the first place. When Allison Hiltz met her now-former husband, she was working in retail. Neither of them had a four-year degree. She finished her bachelor’s, and then the two moved to Colorado, where she earned a master’s degree in public policy and, later, a seat on the Aurora city council—all of which she was able to do, she said, only because her husband made enough as a diesel mechanic in the trash industry to keep them financially afloat.

The few breadwinning wives I interviewed had high levels of education. Sonia Ben Hedia Twomey was an undergraduate when she first met her husband, John Twomey, who has a bachelor’s degree in business and works in the auto industry in Austin. Sonia eventually earned a Ph.D. and is now a computational linguist for a major tech company. John’s job makes decent money, he told me, “but it doesn’t make her money.”

For the most part, the wives and husbands I interviewed didn’t think of their educational gap as a problem. Another Mary, who asked to be identified only by her first name given the sensitive nature of the topic, recently earned a master’s degree and is married to a man who has yet to complete his undergraduate work. “He’s very educated,” she told me. “He just doesn’t have a bachelor’s.” She would like for him to finish his degree, mainly for the professional opportunities, she said. But she and other women I spoke with told me that they didn’t believe that formal education automatically translated to smarts or intellectual curiosity—and that they felt on pretty equal footing with their husbands.

In a few cases, women floated the possibility that they’d avoided tension in their marriage because their husbands earned more than they did. Perhaps, they suggested—alluding to entrenched gender norms—earning less than one’s wife would feel like a greater threat to a man’s masculinity than having less education?

For what it’s worth, the Twomeys told me that Sonia’s breadwinning didn’t bother either of them—although other people are sometimes weird about it. After Sonia gave birth to their first child, it was John who left his job to care for their baby boy. The decision just made sense: Day-care prices where the couple live are high, John was burned out at work, and he relished the opportunity to bond with his son. But when the couple mentioned their arrangement to friends, family, and co-workers, many people reacted with surprise or confusion. John’s parents seemed almost concerned. “It blew their minds,” he told me.

[Read: I still get called daddy-mommy]

Stay-at-home-dad life could also feel isolating when John ventured into public, he told me. On weekday mornings, when he would head to a park or museum with his son, he was invariably the only man around. “I was like, I’m sticking out here,” John told me. “People probably think I stole a child.”

So far, the social weirdness of their arrangement hasn’t been enough to rock the Twomeys’ marriage. But Hiltz, the Colorado woman who served on her city council, said that it was. People who work in local politics, which is not terribly lucrative, are generally well aware that high-earning spouses may be subsidizing their colleagues’ political careers, Hiltz told me. But where she lives, the assumption is usually that the spouse is a doctor or a lawyer. When people would inquire about her husband’s work, and “he would say, Oh, I work in trash, you could see people’s minds spin,” Hiltz told me. “It was at times uncomfortable.” In that sort of indirect way, Hiltz does think their education gap contributed to the demise of their marriage: The doors that her education unlocked for her meant she spent time in environments that could end up being socially awkward for both of them. When I spoke with Jack Hiltz, Allison’s ex, he agreed that ultimately, it felt as if they were inhabiting different worlds.

These sorts of societal influences can be tough on a marriage. Steiber pointed me to a recently published study of heterosexual partners in Europe, which suggested that the relationship between the educational matchup of a couple and their well-being depends, to an extent, on the prevailing norms in their given country. But norms aren’t immutable. It used to be that hypogamous marriages were more likely than others to end in divorce. Yet recent analyses of marriages in Europe and the United States suggest that this is no longer the case.

These trends don’t prove that the culture is shifting. But they might offer a reason to be cautiously optimistic about society’s ability to adjust to new realities. After all, cultures are made up of people. And “people are adapting,” Schwartz told me. Perhaps, with time, more of society, too, will learn to adapt to the shifting status of women and men.

This Is No Way to Talk About Children

2025-01-31T10:53:00-05:00

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About 13 years ago, well before I became a parent, I had a conversation with my aunt. She was the kind of aunt a young person could talk to: hilariously frank, slow to judge, and not easily scandalized. We were seated in her rumpus room, me on the couch and her on the floor, as one of her four children (she now has five) toddled back and forth. The topic turned to motherhood. “I’m not sure I like kids,” I said. If she was offended, she didn’t show it. In fact, she seemed to get what I was saying. “Yeah,” she replied, as she looked at her son, “I don’t think I used to like kids either. But I like my own kids.”

Neither of us meant any harm by our bluntness. My aunt, I’m sure, was attempting to be reassuring, and I was just trying to make sense of my ambivalence. In adolescence and early adulthood, I wasn’t someone whom anyone described as being “good with kids.” When a family friend or relative was looking for a babysitter, it wasn’t unheard of for them to ask my younger sister before they asked me. Little kids didn’t usually gravitate toward me, and when they did, I found feigning interest in whatever game they wanted to play a bit laborious. Our interactions often felt nerve-racking or forced, and I wasn’t sure what to make of this; I sensed—or perhaps just assumed—that most women felt otherwise.

Of course, people frequently use reductive language when talking about children: They “like,” “do not like,” or even “hate” kids. Sometimes, particularly in fringier corners of the internet, people appear to mean exactly what they say: They don’t like children as a class of human. But most of the time, I think people are attempting to express more complex emotions in language that feels intuitive. For example, they might be using “I don’t like kids” as shorthand for why they don’t want to become a parent—or regret becoming one. I’ve heard people speak this way to explain why they’d rather not hold a child, or even use the phrasing as a compliment: “I don’t usually like babies,” a young man once told me, “but yours is pretty cool.”

Probably more than anything, people say “don’t like” to express irritation over the disturbances that inevitably occur when children occupy public space: the whining, the shrieking, the knocking-over of things. In those situations, even people who rush to kids’ defense can end up leaning on language that focuses on likability. Children are lovely, they might say, and if you can’t see that, then something is wrong with you.

Stepping back, though—doesn’t something about this feel weird? When you talk about kids in terms of “like” or “don’t like,” you’re basically treating them as objects, the same way you’d talk about cars or handbags or a specific brand of Scotch. But kids aren’t commodities that we accessorize our life with. They’re humans.

In general, I don’t think it’s terribly useful to micromanage the way people speak. But over time, I’ve become convinced that we do need to scrutinize the language many people use to talk about kids, because it reflects and reinforces a view of children as somehow “other”—a view that gets in the way of conversations we ought to be having about children’s place in society and who is responsible for them.

More people than not (I hope) understand that it’s wrong to write off entire categories of humans based on superficial characteristics such as height, weight, skin color, and age. If I were to hear someone say they “don’t like old people,” I wouldn’t hesitate to call them out on it. Yet people talk about children that way all the time. Such broad-based, categorical phrasing effectively functions as a linguistic sleight of hand, allowing people to implicitly dismiss kids as a matter worthy of their concern. If kids are commodities, then responsibility for them falls on the owner and the owner alone. If kids are commodities, then it’s reasonable for me to feel violated when a child who isn’t “mine” throws a tantrum anywhere near my personal space.

I don’t think it’s wrong to be frustrated when a baby cries in the seat behind you on a plane, or when a toddler talks more loudly than social norms would consider polite. Kids do have a tendency to disrupt the tranquility of public life. Yet I believe that as a society, we genuinely need to discuss how adults—parents and nonparents—should engage with and accommodate children, and having that conversation becomes more difficult when people stake out black-and-white positions on kids’ likability.

[Read: An ode to crying babies]

This is a point that most people seem to understand in other circumstances. For instance, whether someone ought to help a blind person cross a busy road has essentially nothing to do with whether you like blind people. What any of us owe to our fellow humans, with all their different capacities and at various stages of life, is a matter of morals—the social contract we share—and not of preference. The goal here, in focusing on language, is not to shame anyone or to make people self-conscious about their use of words. It’s to open up discussion in a way that reduces the likelihood of endlessly speaking past one another.

As a person who spends quite a bit of time writing about the challenges of modern parenting, I want to talk with other people about, say, their hesitation to raise children. In my view, the interests of parents and the child-free are intimately bound together; we each, in our own way, resent the attitude that parenthood is something to be taken for granted. As a parent, I’d like American policy makers to stop taking my domestic labor as a given, to start appreciating the work that mothers and fathers do to raise decent members of society, and to pair that appreciation with more material support. I also get the sense that a lot of child-free people—in particular, child-free women—are bothered by those who believe that parenthood is a default condition, and who suggest, as our new vice president once did, that people who aren’t raising kids “don’t really have a direct stake” in what happens in our nation. But as soon as someone who is ambivalent about children declares that they “don’t like” kids, a wedge is driven between parents and nonparents. We’re no longer on the same team.

[Read: Cultural shifts alone won’t persuade people to have kids]

This goes for all of the other pressing concerns about child-rearing that Americans ought to be discussing. Is the country’s threadbare family-policy framework, with its nonexistent paid parental leave and meager funding for child care or other financial support, adequately addressing the needs of children? (No? Then let’s talk about it.) Do we owe it to kids to take their needs into consideration when we’re setting workplace policy? Is the way we’ve divvied up our public resources—with the country spending far more on the elderly than on the young—truly just? Parent or not, whether you “like kids” or not, decisions about policy at some point wind up affecting all of us. And discussing these concerns would be easier if we could dispense with the “don’t like” language and strive to use words that reflect children’s humanity.

I won’t try to offer readers a set of scripts to use in place of our more objectifying terminology. But I would like to propose an experiment: If you find yourself moved to say you don’t like kids, swap in another group of people and see whether that feels like an acceptable thing to say. If it doesn’t, consider thinking in more nuanced terms about the idea you’re trying to express—terms that make clear you’re talking, with all due respect, about your fellow humans. Most likely, doing so will help your position sound a lot more reasonable. And it will certainly improve your odds of being heard.

The Isolation of Intensive Parenting

2025-01-02T07:30:00-05:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

If you were to ask me about the lowest point of my life as a parent, I could pinpoint it almost to the day. It was in early March 2021. The United Kingdom was a couple of months into its third and longest COVID lockdown. I had been living in the country for more than a year, but having arrived just a few months before the outbreak, I still felt like a stranger in town. My kids were 2 and 3 years old, and my youngest was going through a screaming phase. I was overwhelmed, depressed, and crushingly lonely. Something had to change.

“Household mixing” was, at the time, strictly prohibited. But tucked into the lockdown guidelines was a provision allowing parents to form a child-care bubble with one other family. So I sent a message to a WhatsApp group of local parents I’d been added to, asking if anyone was interested in forming such a bubble. Mercifully, a couple took me up on the offer—and they happened to live around the corner. Like us, they’d recently moved from the United States and had no family or friends to draw on for support. And like us, they had two young daughters. After a brief video call, we decided to take turns watching each other’s children for a few hours one evening a week.

It was, in hindsight, an audacious way to go about arranging child care. We didn’t really know these people. We had done no vetting and spoken little about what the children would do or eat while they were in the other household’s care. The expectation certainly wasn’t for either family to prepare special activities or entertainment for the kids—just to keep them alive for a few hours.

I didn’t presume that this desperation-induced pact would outlast the pandemic. But I was wrong about that. We’ve continued our “baby swap,” as we’ve come to call it, in an almost entirely unbroken pattern for nearly three years. In fact, it has grown: Now four families are involved. Two nights a week, one family takes all the children for three hours, giving the other parents an evening off. Even outside these formal arrangements, it has become fairly routine for us to watch one another’s kids as needed, for one-off Fridays or random overnights. A few months ago, while I was stirring a big pot of mac and cheese for the six kids scurrying around me, ranging in age from 2 to 7, I realized that, quite unintentionally, I’d built something like the proverbial “village” that so many modern parents go without.

[Read: What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street]

Over time, I’ve concluded that the success of this laid-back setup isn’t a coincidence; our village thrives not despite the comically low expectations we have for one another, but because of them. And this, in turn, clarified something unexpected for me: The hovering, “intensive” approach to parenting that has steadily come to dominate American, and to some extent British, family life is simply incompatible with village building. You can try to micromanage your child’s care—whether they eat sugar, whether they get screen time, whether someone insists that a child apologize after snatching another kid’s toy—or you can have reliable community help with child care. But you can’t have both.

The term intensive parenting perhaps conjures images of achievement-obsessed parents drilling their 2-year-olds on their ABCs or pushing their 4-year-olds to take daily violin lessons. Here, I’m using the term a bit more broadly to encapsulate the tendency among many modern parents to assign outsized importance to any particular decision a parent or other caregiver makes. It reflects a highly deterministic view of child-rearing—one that offers parents little room for error. And these days, it comes in a variety of flavors. Some parents are neurotic about validating their kids’ emotions or guarding their individuality; others fixate on maximizing their career potential. Even those who repudiate overly achievement-focused parenting can become intensive about not pushing their kids, as if nudging a child to give soccer a try will somehow compromise their emotional development.

I believe that parenting, and parenting well, is important. It’s good to thoughtfully consider children’s needs. Taken to the extreme, though, the intensive approach can foreclose opportunities for community support. This is true in the simple sense that if your child’s schedule is jam-packed with enrichment activities, then it will be much harder for you and your would-be villagers to find time to help one another. (This was, no doubt, one reason it was so easy to coordinate baby swapping during the pandemic—we weren’t running around doing other things.) But it’s also true in a deeper sense: Inflating the importance of parental decisions assumes a degree of control over a child’s environment that is out of step with village life.

If you want to rely on your community, you have to rely on the community you’ve got. As the anonymous writer of the newsletter Cartoons Hate Her recently pointed out, parents who pine for a village cannot expect it to be “a bespoke neighborhood you might curate in The Sims”; traditionally, villages just consisted of “the people around us.” And you can’t expect to assert the same control you might in a paid babysitting arrangement. When I hire a sitter, we have a shared understanding that I’m still in charge—that I’m paying them to come into my home and largely replicate my systems of care. Money also helps cordon off the boundaries of an exchange: Once the service has been provided and the money handed over, each party can walk away knowing they’re settled up. But that’s not how “village” reciprocity works.

[Read: Don’t tell America the babysitter’s dead]

A village agreement is, in its way, transactional; our baby swap certainly involves a trade. But the nature of the deal is quite different. I’m not hiring the families around me to replicate all my household systems; I’m asking them to make room for my kids within their households for an evening, with the understanding that I’ll do the same for them.

Allowing each household to largely carry on doing its own thing makes the whole situation feel more relaxed. This arrangement is also better aligned with the real goal of village building: to forge a network of relationships defined by a sense of community obligation. In such a scenario, asking other households for help without settling up feels ordinary, because you’ll be in one another’s lives the next week and the week after that. The beauty of raising kids in a village is that, eventually, looking out for one another’s children starts to feel less like a series of one-off favors and more like an ordinary part of life.

Inevitably, building a village means developing trust. That means loosening up a bit, letting go of both judgments and self-consciousness about the varying ways that people live with and care for children. The kids in my little village can be quite frank about how our households differ. They don’t hesitate to let me know that my home is the messy house. And it’s something of a running joke that I pretty much never serve them anything but pasta. My husband and I are sticklers about “please” and “thank you” and basically never let the kids watch TV. Other families have their own rules and rituals. For this whole thing to work, I have to have faith that each household has its own sensible systems for managing manners, conflict, and screen time, and that whatever those systems are, they will not break my children.

Of course, I wouldn’t leave my kids with just anyone. Trusting people doesn’t mean never setting boundaries or never asking that accommodations be made for a child who needs them. But it does often mean accepting that other people will manage your child’s needs in ways that you wouldn’t. This can be a nerve-racking experience. It can also be an enriching and enlightening one. Handing off your children, relaxing your grip, might help chip away at the fears that make you think you need to control everything, and can show you that your children will adapt and thrive in a variety of settings. A village, that is, can provide one of the greatest gifts that anyone can offer parents: the reassurance that the path to raising healthy, well-adjusted kids isn’t as narrow as you think.

Why Do Big Families Get Such a Bad Rap?

2024-12-18T07:22:44-05:00

In the video, my siblings and I stand with our mother on the large porch of a house somewhere in Virginia, before a small crowd gathered across the street. We’re dressed plainly, except for my mother, who wears a festive sweater and headband. And we are singing—“The 12 Days of Christmas,” “Carol of the Bells,” my grandpa’s arrangement of “Hey Ho, Anybody Home” with “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” For most of the performance, my mother conducts us from a music stand, pitch pipe in hand. Only during “Hodie Apparuit,” a somewhat intricate three-part Latin carol by Orlando di Lasso, does she leave her post, to sing “firsts” with me. I was not the youngest child in the family. But in choral matters, I always needed the most help.

I am not a musical person. I do not play any instruments. I can’t read music or write songs, the way some of my siblings do in their spare time. And I have never described myself as a singer. (Although here, my mother would interject to reassure readers that I have a “lovely voice.”) I don’t generally sing at all unless I feel well assured that, shrouded in protective layers of other voices, no one can hear me, or at least not me in particular. The second those voices fall away, my voice breaks. I may be able to sing a tune, but I can’t carry one.

Nevertheless, I sing a lot—even now, because that is what my family does when we get together. I often find this dynamic, in which music remains an enormous part of my life despite my ineptitude, tricky to explain to people. But it also encapsulates what I consider one of the undersung advantages of being raised in a big family: It can draw the best out of you by drawing you out of yourself.

[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]

I am the middle of five children, all of us born within the span of seven years. Growing up, I rarely stopped to consider whether I liked being in a large family, perhaps because in the Catholic circles in which my family ran, we were hardly the biggest. I would not describe us as any chummier than your average lot of sisters and brothers. We played together and have about a million inside jokes. We also fought a lot. Over the years, our relationships with one another have at times been deeply strained. But I am and always have been fiercely defensive of my siblings, which is why I find it difficult to know what to make of the research indicating that I’m worse off for having them.

A significant body of evidence suggests, for instance, that kids with more siblings do worse in school than their counterparts from smaller families, across a variety of educational outcomes: math and reading scores, high-school graduation rates, college enrollment and graduation, and overall educational attainment. The relationship between number of siblings and achievement shrinks after researchers correct for factors such as parental education and income, Douglas Downey, a sociology professor at Ohio State University, told me, but it doesn’t disappear. A 2015 study found that as family size increases, children score worse on cognitive tests and exhibit more behavioral challenges; it suggested, too, that kids from bigger families are at greater risk of experiencing criminal conviction and teen pregnancy, and are more likely to earn less as adults.

Yet research also indicates that coming from a big family can offer benefits. Some studies have found that, on average, the more siblings you have as a child, the less likely you are to divorce as an adult. “That’s suggestive that maybe you learn some interaction skills growing up that then translate into building long-lasting relationships later in adulthood,” Downey told me. Other research has found that quality sibling relationships can be a meaningful buffer against loneliness in adulthood.

[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]

Still, kids in big families do tend to struggle in a variety of ways. The prevailing explanation for this, initially put forward by the sociologist Judith Blake in the 1980s, is commonly referred to as “resource dilution.”

The resource-dilution model notes that parents have finite means; the more children they have, the thinner those means are spread. And although reasons exist to question this theory—it’s possible, for instance, that the relationship between family size and educational outcomes isn’t actually causal, Downey said—I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something to it. To be honest, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t. Particularly in the United States, where so much of a child’s welfare is determined by their parents, the notion that those parents’ time and income would go further on two kids than five doesn’t seem far-fetched.

In fact, I don’t think resource dilution quite captures how having siblings alters the divvying up of family resources. The term makes it sound as if each kid just gets a smaller cut of the family funds. But in my experience, it isn’t so simple. My parents weren’t poor, but even with help from my grandparents, they didn’t have enough money to send five kids to college, for example. Minimizing the amount of debt each of us had to take on meant we all had to compromise. I doubt I could have gotten into a really prestigious school, but it didn’t occur to me to try, because in my family you didn’t go to the best school you could get into, or even the best you could afford with one-fifth of the family college fund. You went to the school that gave you the most money, to maximize what was left over for your siblings. It was the opposite of meritocracy: The person with the highest SAT scores got the smallest slice of the pie.

The scarcest resource was our parents’ attention. I saw my parents plenty, but my individual needs often got lost in the shuffle. I was constantly showing up to school without whatever form or costume or special hairdo kids were supposed to have that day. My brother—not my parents—dropped me off at college.

[Read: Are siblings more important than parents?]

I’d be lying if I said I haven’t occasionally wrestled with resentment for the inevitably unfair way my parents’ resources have shaken out. If I can overlook such grievances now, it’s because—I know I’m lucky to say—my most basic needs were never in jeopardy. I also can’t exactly blame my parents: I’m under no illusion that having a bunch of kids is a breeze. I myself became so overwhelmed with just two children that I felt the need to hit pause on having more until I could come up for air.

Nevertheless, I think that in many ways my life is richer than it might have been had all my family’s resources been poured into me. And coexisting with all those people pushed me to try things that I likely wouldn’t have if I’d been an only child or one of just two. Which brings me back to all that singing, and the deep joy I’ve experienced as the only unmusical member of a sibling choir—descendants of a family with a long musical history.

My great-grandfather was a violinist in the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra. His daughter, my grandmother, earned a scholarship to the Metropolitan Opera. Her husband, my grandfather, was not only a composer who wrote liturgical music, motets, symphonies, and string quartets but also a beloved music teacher who believed that music was as crucial to the development of the mind as math. An attempt to live out this belief drove my mother to teach me and my siblings to sing together from an early age. She started with simple rounds, such as “Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening.” Then she taught us to sight-read using solfège (the do-re-mi system memorably rendered in The Sound of Music), so we could tackle (or, in my case, stumble through) more challenging polyphonic tunes.

My siblings took to music with ease. Today, if you hand any one of them the sheet music of an unfamiliar song, they’ll be singing it within the hour. If they mess up, you probably won’t know. They’ll wander from a given tune while maintaining harmony with it, then meander back without drawing notice. Then there’s me, the one whose lack of innate ability seems to have defied both nature and nurture. To perform a song halfway confidently, I have to drill it into my neural pathways through rote memorization, as if I’m hammering down a railroad. If I get knocked off track, forget correcting course. I’m a train wreck.

And yet, at every opportunity, I’ve kept singing with my family. We sing when someone graduates, marries, or welcomes a new child. We still carol for neighbors, fellow churchgoers, and perfect strangers at every chance we get. My parents eventually divorced, but when my dad died a few years ago, my siblings and I gathered with our aunts, uncles, and cousins, and, with my mother conducting us as usual, sang as his coffin was lowered into the grave.

By one view, this part of my life—the 10,000 hours I’ve spent honing a craft I do not have the talent or passion to master—is a missed opportunity. Perhaps, had I grown up in a smaller family, I would have devoted that time and energy to some other skill to which I was better suited. Yet that prospect only saddens me, because singing with my family is among my most cherished pastimes. It’s what I’m homesick for when homesickness strikes.

Life in a big family is all about making do—with the hand-me-down winter coat that only sort of fits, with the sport that you only sort of like, with the fact that you will always be the worst singer in the group. You could see this as indignity. But I see it as a reason to be grateful. I get to sing because my family chooses, over and over, to make do with me.

Cultural Shifts Alone Won’t Persuade People to Have Kids

2024-09-26T08:30:00-04:00

When the U.S. fertility rate began falling, toward the end of the 2000s, it at first seemed a predictable response to the hardships of the Great Recession. But as the economy has recovered, fertility has only continued dropping, reaching yet another historic low last year—and raising doubts among some commentators about whether financial concerns are the true cause. Multiple books by such doubters have recently argued, each in its own way, that the primary factors holding people back from parenthood are not economic but cultural. They have cited America’s excessively individualistic and intensive approach to parenting, or the lack of a shared faith that children are a blessing, or a growing ambivalence about whether bringing life into the world is truly a worthy pursuit. Academics, bloggers, and pop pronatalists have meanwhile pointed to a shift in priorities among young people, the low status of motherhood, and the excesses of modern childhood as likely culprits.

Many proponents of these culture-based views draw on a variety of at least outwardly puzzling economic facts to bolster their case. For instance, fertility tends to fall as countries get richer, which is not what you’d expect if people’s ability to afford children is the issue. Policies aimed at boosting the birth rate with financial incentives have had fairly modest impacts where they’ve been tried. And fertility has been falling even in countries such as Finland and Sweden, where parents receive broad state support. All of this, the argument goes, suggests that whatever is driving down fertility probably doesn’t have much to do with money. As Christine Emba wrote recently in The Atlantic, “No amount of money or social support will inspire people to have children—not unless there is some deeper certainty that doing so makes sense.” Or as Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote for Reason, it’s not child care or paid parental leave that American parents need, but a “vibe shift.”

[Read: The real reason people aren’t having kids]

I have no problem believing that culture plays a role in young people’s growing hesitation to have kids. In fact, I’ve made a version of this argument myself. And ample evidence indicates that cultural beliefs, values, and norms play an enormous role in household decision making in general, and fertility decisions in particular, Matthias Doepke, a London School of Economics professor, told me. But it would be a mistake to assume that a society’s culture and economy are quite so unrelated. Culture doesn’t just “fall out of the sky,” Doepke told me. To some extent, culture reflects the material reality in which it operates, and evolves in conjunction with it. This means that anyone who would like to see a shift in cultural attitudes toward child-rearing cannot ignore the economic barriers to such a transformation.

Contrary to arguments purporting otherwise, the notion that falling fertility has little to do with economics is hardly a settled matter. Many of those who assert as much overlook the extent to which the economics of child-rearing have changed in a relatively short time span. For most of human history, as Doepke told me, having children was not a luxury but a necessity. People didn’t have kids despite material deprivation but as a means of avoiding it.

Things are of course very different today, for well-documented reasons. With the emergence of labor markets and the decline of agriculture, the outlawing of child labor and the institution of mandatory education, as well as the creation of public pensions and Medicare, many adults no longer have to (or can) rely as much on their own kids to survive. Instead, as Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic years ago, we depend on other people’s kids, in ways so diffuse that it is easy to forget that we will, at some point, be dependent on anyone at all. Meanwhile, the costs of child-rearing are still largely borne by individual parents. This has created a strange situation in which, as the economist Nancy Folbre wrote in a 1994 paper, everyone relies in numerous ways on the generations of children that come after us, but raising children yourself doesn’t end up making a ton of economic sense. This reality is not unique to the United States: Swedes and Finns, too, have powerful financial incentives to minimize the number of children they have.

[Read: To have or not have children]

The relationship between culture and economics is not a settled matter either. In reality, the boundary between the two is blurrier than many people imagine. “Even the variables that we consider purely economic, like the level of technology, productivity, and so on, have very strong cultural aspects,” Enrico Spolaore, a Tufts University economics professor, told me. Although the researchers I spoke with had subtly different perspectives on how the economy shapes culture, they all agreed that it inevitably does. And plenty of research backs them up. A study published in 2020, for example, found that regions of the world where people have historically relied on rice farming—which requires extensive cooperation among farmers to manage water use—tend to have more rigid social norms than regions where people have farmed wheat, which requires less neighborly collaboration. In a similar vein, agricultural societies that relied on plows, which favored male upper-body strength and led to a gendering of farmwork, have less egalitarian attitudes toward gender roles today. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people, which produced a dearth of men in West Africa, helps explain the comparatively high prevalence of polygyny there now.

In other words, if you’re looking for the source of some cultural ailment or oddity, it’s worth examining the economy underpinning it. Indeed, Doepke’s research suggests that one of the driving forces behind the United States’ intensive parenting culture is the country’s extreme economic inequality, which leads some parents to worry about potentially dire consequences should their children fall behind.

This feedback loop between culture and economics can be tricky to observe because it does not occur in real time. As the studies above suggest, cultural norms can linger long after the economic incentives that bolstered them have fallen away. It takes years, decades, even centuries for norms to erode under economic pressure. And many values can take a while to catch up to new material realities. Attitudes toward working mothers, for example, have changed drastically over time as more women have entered the workforce, but “with a lag,” Doepke told me. It’s entirely possible that the sidelining of child-rearing in young people’s priorities we are witnessing today is an adaptation to economic shifts from previous eras. That is precisely what Folbre suggested might happen in her paper from 30 years ago. “In the long run,” she warned, “failure to remunerate commitments to parental labor may weaken the values, norms, and preferences that supply it”—that is, you can free ride on parents’ labor for only so long before people start to question the idea that having kids is important or fulfilling.

[Read: The two ways to raise a country’s birth rate]

None of this is to say that culture is wholly a by-product of the underlying economy—only that each inevitably shapes and constrains the other. As it happens, a pair of recent papers help shed light on how this interplay between cultural norms and economic incentives pushed fertility lower in the past.

Technically, the present baby bust in America and elsewhere did not begin with the Great Recession but resumed. The now-global trend toward low fertility has been under way for some time, beginning with France in the late 18th century. Demographers consider France’s fertility decline a bit mysterious, because it happened several decades before declines in any other country and despite the fact that France was still relatively poor at the time. Cultural factors played an enormous role in this process. Before the late 18th century, any attempt to limit the number of children one had in marriage was strictly prohibited by the Catholic Church and socially disapproved of. “You would be shunned by your village, your town, your family,” Spolaore, a co-author of one of the papers, told me. But in 1760 or so, France’s turn toward secularization lifted this taboo, and fertility started to fall. In other European countries, fertility rates dropped first in regions culturally similar to France, such as the French-speaking part of Belgium, underscoring how new ideas about fertility control flowed through social channels.

Although these findings emphasize the cultural roots of fertility decline, they also demonstrate how material conditions work to enable or constrain such cultural innovation.

Within France, secularization decreased fertility only “in regions with high population density—that is, where economic incentives to lower fertility and increase education were already in place,” Guillaume Blanc, a University of Manchester economics professor and the author of one of the studies, told me. And in French-speaking regions outside France, the ideas necessary to bring about fertility decline could not have taken hold absent certain economic preconditions, Spolaore told me. Rural agricultural areas—where having many children remained an economic boon to a couple, and child-rearing came with few financial trade-offs—saw no such cultural transformation. That makes sense: Few in these areas were sitting around looking for reasons to justify having smaller families. “The intrinsic incentives to have fewer kids have to be there,” Spolaore told me.

If the goal is to increase fertility, neither cultural nor economic solutions are likely to work in isolation, Spolaore told me, comparing them to two blades in a pair of scissors. “You need two parts of the scissor to cut something,” he said—they work in concert. If he’s right, and if the goal is to reverse the birth rate’s downward spiral, it would be a mistake to dismiss family policies aimed at making child-rearing more affordable. As long as the United States’ threadbare safety net gives people so far to fall, it may not be possible to temper the country’s intensive-parenting culture. As long as raising children comes at such tremendous personal expense, parents and partners may hesitate to reassure their loved ones that it’s a worthy undertaking. And attempts to convince people of the tremendous value of parenthood may ring hollow if they aren’t paired with material support. It is far, far easier to enact cultural change with the economic winds at your back.

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What Adults Lost When Kids Stopped Playing in the Street

2024-07-29T10:51:00-04:00

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In the summer of 2009, Amy Rose and Alice Ferguson, two mothers living on Greville Road in Bristol, a midsize city in southwest England, found themselves in a strange predicament: They saw entirely too much of their kids. “We were going, like, Why are they here?” Rose told me. “Why aren’t they outside?” The friends decided to run an experiment. They applied to shut their quarter-mile road to traffic for two hours after school on a June afternoon—not for a party or an event but just to let the children who lived there play. Intentionally, they didn’t prepare games or activities, Rose told me, as it would have defeated the purpose of the inquiry: “With time, space, and permission, what happens?”

The results were breathtaking. The dozens of kids who showed up had no problem finding things to do. One little girl cycled up and down the street “3,000 times,” Rose recalled. “She was totally blissed out.” Suddenly, the modern approach to children’s play, in which parents shuttle their kids to playgrounds or other structured activities, seemed both needlessly extravagant and wholly insufficient. Kids didn’t need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less reliant on their time-strapped parents to get outside.

The experiment also produced some unexpected results. As children poured into the street, some ran into classmates, only just then realizing that they were neighbors. Soon it became clear to everyone present that far more children were living on Greville Road than anyone had known. That session, and the many more it prompted, also became the means by which adult residents got to know one another, which led to another revelation for Ferguson and Rose: In numerous ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for adults.

The dominance of cars has turned children’s play into work for parents, who are left coordinating and supervising their children’s time and ferrying kids to playgrounds and play dates. But it has also deprived adults of something more profound. Over the years, as Rose and Ferguson have expanded their experiment to other parts of the United Kingdom, neighborhoods across the country have discovered that allowing kids to play out in the open has helped residents reclaim something they didn’t know they were missing: the ability to connect with the people living closest to them.

Modern folks tend to think that streets serve largely mobile purposes—getting cars from one place to another in swift, orderly fashion. But “prior to the automobile, streets had a ton of stationary functions,” Marcel Moran, a faculty fellow at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, told me. Streets were where people sold wares and socialized. And particularly after the United States and Europe began to industrialize, streets were the primary location for the rising number of urban-dwelling children to play, according to Jon Winder, a historian and the author of Designed for Play: Children’s Playgrounds and the Politics of Urban Space, 1840–2010. This remained the case in the U.K. and the U.S. even after playgrounds became widespread in the early 20th century. Only when cars hit the streets in larger numbers did things begin to change. Society, Winder told me, began prioritizing “the movement and storage of motor vehicles over children and their playful behavior.”

In the U.S., the ousting of children from the street was initially met with fierce resistance, Peter Norton, an associate history professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, told me. In the 1920s, as pedestrian death tolls mounted, a number of American cities erected monuments to children killed in traffic, acknowledging their deaths as public losses the way we memorialize fallen soldiers. When cases involving these tragedies made their way to court, Norton said, judges routinely ruled that “a child has an absolute right to use the street, that it’s the responsibility of everyone else to watch out for the child. The parent does not have to be there.” He added that motorists who argued that they were not at fault, because the child had rushed out in front of them, were told, “That’s no excuse. You chose to operate a dangerous machine that gave you, the driver, the responsibility.”

Over time, however, deliberate efforts within the auto industry shifted the blame for traffic deaths to children and their parents. In the 1920s, the American Automobile Association dispensed free school-safety education materials aimed at teaching children that the road was not for them. Among other things, these curricula redefined the school-safety patrols run by older children tasked with escorting younger kids safely through the streets. Instead of walking into the street to stop traffic, kids were instructed to wait until there were no cars, then to cross. The message was that “if a child’s going to use the street at all, it’s only when there’s no cars,” Norton said. “This immediately became the excuse for raising speed limits.” By the 1940s, these curricula—still produced by AAA—cautioned children against even attempting to use streets at all. And it was hard to argue otherwise, Norton said, because the higher speed limits had in fact made roads quite dangerous.

The broader shift to a car-centric society only further undercut the notion that children have a place in or near the road, Norton told me. Suburbanization combined with school consolidation and court-ordered school busing meant that schools got farther apart, making it impractical for children to walk to them. In the 1980s, warnings about “stranger danger,” which intensified as news and crime shows stoked panic about child abductions, no doubt played a role in further curtailing children’s freedom—though stranger danger itself wasn’t new, Norton noted. Parents of the past relied on a combination of people—shopkeepers, residents, adults sitting on front steps—to keep an eye out for the rare unsavory character who might harm their kids. “But eyes on the street in the U.S., outside of a few surviving communities, is almost gone,” Norton said. “Eyes behind a windshield are no substitute.”

Rose and Ferguson’s project on Greville Road is of course not the first or only effort to reclaim the streets for children. In the U.K., play streets emerged roughly a century ago as a sort of compromise in the process of booting kids off the street. But after peaking in the 1960s, they largely dwindled out, to be revived only in the late 2000s. New York has had a play-streets program since 1914, and Philadelphia for more than half a century—and recently, the idea has been taken up in other U.S. cities. Chicago launched a play-streets program in 2012, followed by Los Angeles in 2015; an initiative in Portland, Oregon, hosted its first events in 2023.

In the U.K., Rose, Ferguson, and their friend Ingrid Skeels expanded their experiment in 2011 by founding Playing Out, an organization that has helped residents on more than 1,000 streets in dozens of cities across the country set up their own play sessions. These typically last for two hours and occur weekly, biweekly, or monthly. And yes, as with any other sort of play these days, the process takes work: Residents who’d like to set up a play street must get buy-in from neighbors, agree on dates, book road closures well in advance, and recruit stewards to stand guard at either end of the block. Organizers are also working against the headwinds of a society unaccustomed to children playing in the street. Even when blocks are officially closed to traffic, stewards often have to address drivers frustrated that they can’t get through. Some residents ask why the kids can’t just go to the park, and they worry about the noise or what will happen to their cars. When Jo Chesterman, a Bristol-based mother of two, first broached the idea of a play session on her street several years ago, some neighbors, she told me, seemed to worry “it was maybe going to be like Lord of the Flies.”

But the street outside a child’s home is very different from a playground or a private yard. It’s a space that connects one home to another and is used by all residents, regardless of age or whether they have kids. On the street, Chesterman told me, kids learn how to find the homes of other children within walking distance. They also encounter children outside their own age group and a broader variety of adults. Rose’s daughter, Kaya, who just graduated from university but was 8 at the time of the inaugural play street, told me that mixing with younger kids afforded her opportunities to win the trust of their parents, which she otherwise wouldn’t have had, and that “feeling like the adults trusted us to look after their kids … made us trust those adults as well.” For the adults, Chesterman said, play streets make it “easier to get to know everyone, rather than wait to bump into each other when you’re doing the recycling.”

[Read: Live closer to your friends]

Surveys conducted by Alison Stenning, a professor of social and economic geography at Newcastle University who started studying the social impact of play streets after helping get one up and running in her own neighborhood, show that many play-street sessions manage to draw out nonparents as well. Sometimes, these connections lead to strong friendships. (Chesterman told me that on her street, plenty of play afternoons led to cozy social evenings with “far too much honey rum.”) But Stenning found that even where deep intimacy didn’t grow, neighbors did gain a more general “sense of knowing and being known”—which also has its value. Years ago, she told me, one rundown house at the end of her street, occupied by an older man and his sister, inspired rumors about who the two were and why their house looked so dilapidated. When the play streets started, the man occasionally emerged to watch the children and chat with the stewards stationed outside his house. There was no major breakthrough or kumbaya moment, but these small interactions helped demystify a slightly odd and somewhat-feared presence on the street.

Some of this neighborly connection is likely the result of all the work and coordination involved in shutting a road to traffic. But it could also have something to do with the way children’s play alters the feel of the street, giving adults permission to engage in the sort of socializing “we’ve otherwise policed out,” Moran, of NYU, told me. Kids themselves function as a sort of “connective tissue for adults,” Moran said. This is true in the simple sense that when kids meet one another, their parents naturally connect. But children are also “very good at breaking down the learned reserve between adults,” Paul Tranter, an honorary associate professor at UNSW Canberra and the author of Slow Cities: Conquering Our Speed Addiction for Health and Sustainability, told me. Children’s tendency to violate social boundaries—to stare a little too long, ask someone an overly forward question, or wander into someone else’s yard—can nudge adults to reach across those boundaries too. It probably isn’t a coincidence that playgrounds are one of the few places in America where striking up a conversation with a stranger is considered socially acceptable and even expected. By siloing play there, we may have inadvertently undercut children’s capacity to bind us to one another.

In Chesterman’s neighborhood, after about four years, street-play sessions had so radically transformed the culture that the need for formal road closures fell away. “The vibe of the street is that [people] expect to see kids playing,” she said. But she suspects that this is possible largely because her road isn’t a through street, so most of the people driving on it actually live there.

[Read: Surrendering our cities to cars would be a historic blunder]

Her experience points to the limitations of play streets: For all their community benefits, they aren’t, in many places, sufficient to transform the way kids or adults use the street. On busier roads, play will always rely on a continuing rotation of people available to organize and steward formal closures. The sheer effort involved in coordinating them means that play streets sometimes fizzle out over time. Even on Greville Road, despite Rose and Ferguson’s deep commitment, weekly after-school sessions have dwindled to monthly Saturday afternoons. And in communities where people lack the time and resources necessary for sustaining regular traffic closures, play streets don’t happen at all.

This may be the ultimate finding of Rose and Ferguson’s experiment: Truly restoring a culture of street play will require society to make much more far-reaching, permanent changes to the built environment. It’s a daunting and perhaps impossible-sounding task. But it’s one that would meaningfully improve the well-being of children, of parents, of every person on the street.

Why Parents Don’t Mind If Their Kids Don’t Marry

2024-07-15T07:00:00-04:00

Few generational stereotypes are more familiar to Americans than the overbearing mother needling her grown children to settle down and start a family. But it may be time to retire that cliché. A recent survey by Pew Research Center found that only 39 percent of registered U.S. voters say “society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority,” and a majority say society is “just as well off if people have priorities other than marriage and children.” This followed earlier Pew research showing that most young adults feel little to no pressure from their parents to marry or have kids, and that most parents do not consider it “important” whether their kids do so.

Findings such as these—as well as a data point from Pew last year that 88 percent of parents consider it “extremely” or “very” important for their children to be financially independent and have jobs or careers they enjoy—have prompted some commentators to worry that Americans have their priorities out of line, placing money and career above relationships and family. But the real story of how parents’ attitudes toward these subjects have changed is more complicated than workism run amok.

In one sense, it’s true that parents’ relatively casual stance on marriage and child-rearing reflects a major departure from tradition; but in another sense, it reflects the stability of parental concern—about economic welfare. Whereas marriage and having kids were once the means by which individuals achieved financial stability, they are now largely inessential to that goal, if not entirely at odds with it, Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families and the author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, told me. Over time, Americans haven’t devalued family in favor of work so much as they’ve come to think of each in categorically different terms. Work—by which we really mean employment—remains something most of us will have to do regardless of what we want; marriage and child-rearing are something we do only if we want. Parents are recognizing that their grown kids don’t have to start families, and that they don’t get much say in the matter anyway.

Historically, it wasn’t just parents who meddled in their children’s marriages; all sorts of people felt entitled to a say in who paired up with whom. That’s why weddings weren’t private affairs, Coontz told me. They were “great, big raucous celebrations,” at the end of which the guests would escort the married couple to bed “to make sure that they consummate the darn thing.” But it would be wrong to interpret such enthusiasm for marriage as a triumph of family over finances. Family was a financial matter. And the centrality of family to economic and political life meant that parents and others had an enormous stake in whether and whom someone married.

[Read: Why does romance now feel like work?]

In early human societies, marriage was a means of building out networks of cooperative relations and circulating resources. Later, it became the primary means by which wealth and land exchanged hands. And before the relatively recent rise of the male-breadwinner family, getting married was fundamental to how a young man or a young woman established themselves. For people in the Middle Ages, marriage was “the most important ‘career’ decision they would ever make,” Coontz wrote in Marriage, a History. Children were likewise a highly valuable, if not essential, asset, working their parents’ land and caring for them in old age. Particularly for farmers—that is, most people before the Industrial Revolution—the need for children was sometimes so urgent that barren wives “often had to be put aside,” Coontz wrote, “regardless of how much affection might have developed within the couple.”

In the upper classes, marriage’s utility as a bargaining chip for forging political alliances and amassing property created pressure to marry someone who would add to the family’s fortune and status, Coontz said. Among the lower classes, where exchange was local and survival required collaboration, the pressure was to find a trustworthy spouse who would contribute to the community. Well into the mid-20th century, when marriage was still a woman’s best shot at financial independence, many parents were quite concerned that their daughters marry a man who could support her such that they wouldn’t have to.

In other words, modern parents’ preoccupation with financial stability is nothing new. What’s changed is the means of attaining it. Marriage offers some economic advantages, but it’s not the only way for men or women to comfortably survive. And having kids certainly won’t do your wallet any favors. In fact, the best economic case for marriage in America is that it mitigates the steep cost of raising kids—if you decide to have them.

That attitudes toward work and family have diverged was evident in the handful of conversations I recently had with parents from across the country. Pretty much every parent I consulted considered it vital that their children achieve financial independence and find a job or career they enjoy. Some wanted the work itself to be fulfilling; others simply hoped a job would allow their kids to have a fulfilling and enjoyable life, even if it meant they weren’t passionate about their work or tremendously wealthy. But everyone’s position seemed to be rooted less in notions about the empowering possibilities of work than in the reality that their kids would have to spend a huge portion of their lives working. “Our kids are not going to be independently wealthy; we don’t have a huge trust fund to give them,” Lucy Chapin, a midwife living in Vermont with her partner and two children, told me. “They will have to very likely work … And I really hope that they can find something they feel fulfilled doing day in and day out.”

[Read: The happiness trinity]

This pragmatic resignation to the necessity of employment contrasted starkly with the way parents spoke about marriage and child-rearing, which most viewed not as bad or even trivial, but as optional. Several parents told me they didn’t consider it important that their kids marry, but the parents were hardly apathetic about their kids’ relationships. It was the legal union—the “piece of paper”—that most regarded as dispensable. “If they found a relationship and were content with never getting married, I would be happy with that,” Kelly Schneiderloch, a nurse based near Pittsburgh who has four children in their 20s, told me. It also seemed crucial to parents that the decision to pair up with someone be made free from economic pressure. That’s one reason Chapin hopes her children will be financially independent: She doesn’t want them to feel like they need to stay in an unhappy relationship for monetary reasons. If it’s economic security you’re after, better to be stuck in a bad job than a bad marriage.

Chapin’s logic points to a slightly different interpretation of the research on parents’ aspirations for their children. Coontz noted that the Pew survey from last year pitted a desire for one’s kids to be “financially independent” and “have jobs or careers they enjoy” against the hope that they would “get married” and “have children”—not exactly a fair comparison. Just as it’s possible to have an underpaid or unfulfilling job, it’s possible to have an unhappy marriage or raise children under intensely difficult circumstances. Coontz suspects that Pew’s results would have come out differently had it asked parents whether it was important to them that their kids have “a satisfying, fulfilling marriage relationship.”

She added that 50 or so years ago, most parents would have agreed it was important for their kids to marry, without reassurance of relationship quality. That so few would say as much now is not, in her mind, an indication that we’ve devalued marriage, but that our benchmark for what constitutes a good marriage has risen. Nick Miller, a lawn- and garden-equipment mechanic who lives in Holmes County, Ohio, with his wife and two children, said that he would love for his kids to find spouses, because marriage has been such a positive experience for him. But he added that he and his wife “agreed that it’s more important for them to have fulfilling lives and good relationships with friends, whether or not they’re married.”

Many parents I spoke with were similarly hesitant to say that having children should be a priority for their kids. Some cited the expense and challenge of parenting; others had more personal reasons. Jo-Ann Finkelstein, a clinical psychologist and the author of the forthcoming book Sexism & Sensibility: Raising Empowered, Resilient Girls in the Modern World, told me that she was shocked by the way having kids transformed what for her “had been a pretty equal relationship with a feminist-identifying man.” Their partnership “just became sort of this traditional cliché of me thinking of everything and worrying about everything,” she said, which has affected how she thinks about her own children and the families they might start. She does hope that her kids will want children of their own, she told me, but “I don’t want my daughter in the position I found myself in.”

More than anything, parents seemed to be weighing their hopes for grandchildren against a reluctance to goad their kids into bearing them. “You can’t just tell people to have children,” Kerry, a lawyer from Maryland with two kids in elementary school, told me. “It’s such an enormous decision.” Kerry had beautiful things to say about how parenting unlocked a new dimension of the human experience for her, and she considered it “very important” that her children have that experience one day. But she asked to be identified by only her first name to avoid putting undue pressure on her kids should they ever read this article. Her plan is to model a joyful family life such that raising children seems like an attractive option. “The best way to get people to want to do something,” she said, “is to just, like, make it look awesome.”

Discomfort with pushing kids to follow a particular life plan was a common thread in all of my conversations with parents. Many spoke about their role as being not to tell their kids how to lead a good life, but to help them figure out what sort of life they want and how to achieve it. This evolution of what it means to be a parent is generations in the making. “I try a lot harder than my parents did, and they tried a lot harder than their grandparents did, to let people live their own lives,” Coontz said. This retreat from parental authority isn’t wishy-washy indifference but a clear-eyed embrace of reality. After all, the same economic shifts that have made it easier for people to leave a marriage, or to forgo the whole institution, have made it easier for adult children to ignore their parents’ wishes, or to build a life without their parents in it. In that respect, people’s qualms about pestering their kids to expand their families may simply reflect parents’ desire to hang on to the family they’ve already got.

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The Same Old Sex Talk Isn’t Enough

2024-05-31T07:00:00-04:00

Growing up in a Catholic family, I spent a lot of my teen years being lectured to about the downsides of premarital sex. At their best, these talks, usually delivered in sex-segregated groups, contained a message that, looked at sideways, might have been described as feminist: Dating someone did not entitle them to your body, and a man’s libido was never to be favored over your own (spiritual) well-being. At their worst, they were objectifying and cruel; one speaker advised a group of middle-school girls to envision our purity as an apple that we would one day offer our spouse.

Now I have two daughters of my own. I want to offer them sexual guidance that recognizes the value of caution, but I also want to spare them the sort of shaming my peers and I were subjected to. Yet I’m not confident I know where the line between caution and shame lies. This ambivalence was heightened recently when I read an opinion article in The New York Times about the rise of sexual choking among young people. The practice, relatively rare 20 years ago, has lately become fairly common among college-age kids, according to research by Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health at Bloomington and the author of Yes, Your Kid: What Parents Need to Know About Today’s Teens and Sex. The majority of female college students surveyed at one large American university said that a partner had choked them during sex; 40 percent said they were under 18 when it first happened; and, according to the Times article, most said their partners “never or only sometimes asked before grabbing their necks.”

This development is troubling for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being that choking is incredibly dangerous, regardless of how it is done. Even when it isn’t deadly (and it is, occasionally), repeated asphyxiation restricts blood flow to the brain, which research suggests can result in brain damage not unlike the sort caused by recurrent concussions. The second reason is that the emergence of choking and other “rough sex” behaviors has a decidedly gendered arc, with women overwhelmingly on the receiving end. Some women insist that they enjoy being choked. But there is little evidence that the practice’s newfound popularity has led to an increase in women’s pleasure (they still report reaching orgasm far less often than men), nor has it been matched by an uptick in other practices that might (the idea of using vibrators still seems to give some young men the ick).

Even kink communities—a pretty adventurous lot—have cautioned against choking and articulated that there are limits to what consenting individuals can safely do together. And anyway, doing kink ethically requires a lot of communication about personal desires and boundaries, discussions that young people don’t seem to be having.

In considering all of this, I at first found myself wondering whether the chastity proselytizers of my youth were right to encourage some degree of sexual restraint. The boundless sexual exploration endorsed by a more liberated culture seems to have inadvertently trapped young people in sexual dysfunction—that is, acceptance of sexual variety has morphed into an expectation of sexual violence. Some, no doubt, have discovered a genuine taste for a rougher variety of sex. But it seems that many feel they have no other option. In fact, Herbenick suspects that the violent nature of modern sex is one reason young people are having less of it.

But after talking with researchers, I realized my initial hunch wasn’t quite right. It’s not that an ethos of sexual freedom has backfired; it’s that “freedom” was never really possible in the first place.

We often talk about sex as an exploration, or a discovery, as if an individual’s sexuality—the ways in which they derive thrill and gratification from sex—is something fixed and internal, there for the finding if they are brave enough to look. There is likely some truth to this, Elizabeth Morgan, a psychology professor at Springfield College, told me. Evidence suggests that individual physiologies can predispose people to different sensitivities, Morgan said, and biology “governs certain places on our body that produce different sexual responses.” Even the satisfaction some people seem to derive from choking has a biological explanation: Asphyxiation can produce euphoria. Yet sexuality isn’t fixed; people can “learn to connect physical pleasure with all sorts of different things—people, objects, places, parts of the body, or whatever else,” Morgan said. And these tastes are inevitably shaped by culture.

Young people gather information about whether they should be having sex, and what it ought to involve, from a diversity of sources—subtle and not—over years. Taken together, these data form the “sexual scripts” they rely on in the uncertainty and vulnerability of a sexual encounter. “Teens are not being raised in a vacuum, and they are exposed to a variety of images and messages and song lyrics and pictures and magazines and TikToks and social medias and friends,” Morgan told me. “All of that is shaping their formation of what, when they get maybe alone with one other person, what they’re supposed to be doing.” And it happens whether people realize it or not. In a study published in 2006, Morgan found that among 334 undergraduate students, those who watched dating game shows were more likely to hold gamelike, adversarial beliefs about dating. Some participants reported watching the shows to learn about relationships, while others insisted they watched just for fun—but both groups seemed to internalize the game’s messages about dating as a brutal competition.

[Read: The nudes internet]

The sudden popularity of sexual choking makes a lot more sense when you recognize the social influences guiding sexual behavior. Of the many young men and women Herbenick has interviewed, there were only a few she believes would have found their way to the practice had they been born in another era. Most are “engaging in choking because of the influences around them,” Herbenick told me, including peers, pornography, social media, and TV shows that “tell them that this is what sex is like today.”

The prevalence of rough sex is evidence of the degree to which porn in particular and the internet in general have hijacked the sexual formation of young people—and how dysfunctional sexual dynamics can get as a result. Much of the sex that porn depicts is, well, fake. It is ordered not toward the pleasure of those who appear in it, but toward the titillation of those watching it. And the way that sex unfolds on-screen—without much discussion, as though everything that’s happening is intuitive, expected, and welcomed—creates the impression that it is okay to proceed, without asking, with the expansive list of behaviors it depicts, including the violent ones, Emily Rothman, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, told me.

[Read: The problem with being cool about sex]

The result is that porn and pop culture haven’t so much mainstreamed kink as unkinked it. Young people are arriving to the bedroom with divergent expectations, at a time when many more options for sexual play are on the menu—choking is “just kind of what you do when you have sex,” Herbenick said—which means that if you do not want to be choked or slapped or spit on in bed, you have to say so ahead of time.

This is a problem much bigger than any individual parent can solve, but it’s also not one parents can simply ignore. They can attempt to delay their children’s exposure to porn or steer them toward a better version of it, Morgan told me. But given the easy visibility of rough sex in general—in pop culture and on social media—there’s no getting around the need for parents to talk with their kids about what they’re seeing, even if it requires the adults to push through their own discomfort.

At baseline, that means offering kids context: Explain that the spontaneous, nonnegotiated sex they see on-screen is not real life, that it does not offer a good model for how to engage in sexual behavior, and that the rules of porn don’t necessarily align with the law. Strangling someone without their explicit permission is assault—and even with permission, it could land you in legal trouble if it ends in injury or death. Herbenick told me that many of her students express surprise when she shares articles about young men who have been charged with murder for sexual choking gone wrong: “They say, ‘But it’s consensual, right?’ And I’m like, ‘Does it matter? She’s dead.’”

Equipping kids to navigate this confusing sexual landscape is a delicate task that requires raising children who feel entitled to consent, consideration, and respect within their partnerships, but who are also prepared for the eventuality that those things won’t be offered to them. These conversations will inevitably be awkward, but in such a confused sexual landscape, they are also essential. Rothman told me she has counseled her daughters that there is a decent chance a sexual partner will one day attempt to choke them, that it’s not safe, and that it is on them to state clearly: “I don’t do that.”

Although parents don’t have the power to set the ethical framework guiding modern sexual behavior, we can offer children the one we would like to see take root, ideally one that goes well beyond the boundaries of consent. “We want them to be thinking about good sex, mutually pleasurable sex, intimacy, human connection, care, compassion,” Herbenick said. “Not just ‘Did this person say it’s all right?’”

In other words, there was perhaps one seed of truth in the offensive apple metaphor I heard when I was in middle school. It is good to take your partner, whether present or future, into consideration as you explore your own sexuality—but not to ensure your desirability in someone else’s eyes. Rather, you should care that the sex you want to have is the sort a partner will enjoy, because they, like you, are human. It shouldn’t be a turnoff to treat them like one.

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Is It Wrong to Tell Kids to Apologize?

2024-05-06T07:00:00-04:00

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Say you’re sorry. For generations, parents have leaned on the phrase during sibling tiffs and playground scuffles. But it has lately become controversial, particularly among a certain subset of Millennial parents—those for whom the hallmark of good parenting is the reverence they show for their kids’ feelings. Under this model, gone are the days of scolding a child for melting down, sending them to a time-out, or ignoring them until they settle. (Joining them for “time-ins” to help them process their emotions? That’s okay.) The guiding principle seems to be to take children’s current or future feelings into consideration at every parental decision point—even when they are the ones who have hurt the feelings of someone else.

At first blush, making a child express remorse would seem an obvious violation of the feelings-informed approach. And indeed, both Big Little Feelings, the tremendously popular Instagram account and parenting course, and Dr. Becky, the internet-appointed headmistress of the school of Millennial parenting, have condemned the practice. Telling your children to apologize, the argument goes, is useless, unnecessary, even harmful. Useless because it will produce an empty apology. Unnecessary because there are other, better ways to teach children to make amends. Harmful because—well, accusations of harm run the gamut: It will train children to lie or to apologize only as a formality to escape punishment; make them “less kind and thoughtful”; alienate them from their feelings; or shame them into never apologizing again.

These points aren’t necessarily wrong. But as is often the case in modern parenting debates, the stakes are lower and the reality is more nuanced than many influencers would have you believe. Instructing a kid to say sorry is sometimes useless, at least in the moment; it could be unnecessary, depending on the child’s temperament; and it might be harmful, depending on how you go about it. But when you account for the emotional complexity stirred up by conflict, you can find as many feelings-informed reasons to insist on an apology as not.

Take the classic anecdote that’s used to illustrate the downsides of “forced apologies”: A child snatches a toy from a friend or pushes him over. A parent barks at him to “say you’re sorry,” which he does, but in a half-hearted manner. He then carries on with his play, having learned nothing and leaving the victim feeling no better for it.

Broadly, those opposed to forced apologies would argue that for an apology to have any value, it must be rooted in genuine remorse. They would say that young kids lack the cognitive capacity to empathize with someone they’ve hurt, and that simply telling them to apologize won’t help them develop empathy. (“You’re not actually teaching your kid to feel sorry,” as Deena Margolin, a child therapist and co-founder of Big Little Feelings, has put it.) Instead, if parents take the time to cultivate empathy through reflection and good example, genuine apologies will naturally flower.

When it comes to toy-snatching or shoving, that could mean modeling an apology on the child’s behalf, engaging your child in a private conversation about what went down, suggesting (not insisting!) that the child find some way to help the harmed party feel better, or some combination of the three. “The goal is to help them recognize that their actions have consequences for others,” Karina Schumann, an associate professor of social psychology at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in conflict resolution, told me. “In the same way that their actions caused harm, they can also take an active role in repairing that harm by making amends.” These tactics will be more effective if parents themselves, after their own misdeeds, routinely demonstrate what a good apology looks like: one that names the harm and how it affected the other person, and offers a promise to change future behavior. If children “have observed others in their life apologize readily and empathically for their offenses,” Schumann said, “they will learn in time.”

[Read: The fairy-tale promises of Montessori parenting]

Yet apologies are socially and emotionally tricky. Observing my own children, I’ve found that what stops them from apologizing often isn’t an absence of remorse but the presence of other strong emotions—a lingering frustration over whatever precipitated their actions, embarrassment for having publicly messed up, a vague but overblown fear of what will happen if they do apologize. (This last point is true for adults as well: Schumann pointed me to a study noting that adults anticipate that apologizing will feel more humiliating and stressful than it ends up being.) Sometimes, guilt itself seems to be the obstacle; my children feel bad for what they’ve done and want to disappear into my arms rather than call any more attention to it. In other words, the issue isn’t always that a kid doesn’t feel sorry but that, for a variety of reasons, he doesn’t feel like saying so.

And what of the person who was harmed? Surely their feelings matter. The idea that anything less than a freely volunteered apology is worthless is unsupported by research. Especially among the youngest children, both prompted and spontaneous apologies can help repair kids’ relationships. One study found that only when it’s abundantly clear that a child is apologizing against their will does a prompted apology start to lose its value—and even then, kids younger than 7 thought it was better than nothing.

Younger children’s more ready acceptance of shoddy apologies may have something to do with the very fact that they are emotionally underdeveloped. Theory of mind—the ability to recognize that other people have thoughts and feelings different from one’s own—develops gradually in humans, but it’s a process that starts fairly early. Cara Goodwin, a licensed clinical psychologist and the founder of Parenting Translator, a newsletter that breaks down scientific research on parenting, told me that, from infanthood, children can express concern for others’ emotions; for instance, when babies see another baby in distress, they look around for help. But even after kids develop a grasp on others’ emotions, they still often struggle with making apologies—because the big challenge for them is regulating their own emotions.

[Read: Why don’t we teach people how to parent?]

Goodwin agreed that modeling apologies and helping children reflect on their actions are essential. But she thinks there’s a place for prompting, or even insisting on, children’s apologies—for the simple reason that apologizing often doesn’t feel good, at least not right away. Nudging a child through an apology, even one that comes out clouded by other emotions, can teach them to cope with discomfort, help dispel any exaggerated fears, and expose them to some of apologies’ upsides—the relief of being forgiven, or the satisfaction of knowing you’ve done something to right a past wrong. Marjorie Ingall, a co-author of Getting to Sorry: The Art of Apology at Work and at Home, compared apologizing to learning to tie your shoes: You can get only so far watching someone else do it. Trying it yourself is awkward and frustrating at first, but fumble through it enough times and eventually it clicks.

As for concerns about harm, there’s little reason to think that making kids apologize will cause enduring emotional damage, as long as parents take an appropriate approach, Goodwin told me. She drew a distinction between psychological and behavioral control. Attempts to psychologically control kids—guilting, shaming, or otherwise emotionally manipulating them—have been linked to a variety of negative outcomes. So you shouldn’t berate children for their lack of remorse or shame them into expressing it. But there’s nothing wrong with establishing ground rules and then enforcing them by setting a behavioral limit. If you’d like your child to apologize when he knocks over someone’s sand castle, or to find some other way to make amends if you’re stuck on not making him say “I’m sorry,” it’s fine to make him leave the sandbox if he refuses.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that getting your child to apologize will succeed in smoothing over a situation. Perhaps he won’t be forgiven. Perhaps his muffled apology will draw scorn from onlooking peers. There are all manner of ways for conflict resolution to result in emotional bruising—but this is true regardless of your approach.

That brings us to the hard reality of feelings-informed parenting: Children’s emotions are slippery and unpredictable. When you put their feelings in command—especially amid the minefield of childhood conflict—it becomes painfully clear that adults have far less sway than they’d like to believe.

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Whatever Happened to All Those Care Robots?

2024-03-21T09:58:31-04:00

The first thing Pepper told me was that he was running out of battery. “He’s got about 15 minutes before he dies,” Emanuel Nunez Sardinha, a Ph.D. candidate in robotics at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, told me. That turned out to be plenty. Sardinha greeted Pepper; then I did. I asked Pepper how he was doing, to which he replied, “How are you doing?” Then Sardinha resumed telling me about the sorts of things Pepper, a friendly, wide-eyed robot designed to assist humans through social interaction, can do, such as talking through an exercise routine while demonstrating upper-body movements (he doesn’t have legs). But Pepper can get “nervous” in crowds—that is, his voice recognition short-circuits in an environment with multiple people talking—which is what seemed to happen at the lab that day. He kept piping up unprompted as we chatted, flustering Sardinha, who, with a gentle apology to Pepper, put him to sleep.

For such an underwhelming little robot, Pepper has managed to inspire remarkable faith in his potential over the years. He wasn’t designed for any particular purpose; he was introduced by SoftBank Mobile and Aldebaran Robotics in 2014 as “the world’s first personal robot that can read emotions.” But roboticists in private companies and academic institutions quickly set about retooling his software for elder care. Ads showed Pepper monitoring the corridors of a care home for wandering residents, and guiding elderly visitors to the appropriate room of a hospital. In the media, researchers voiced lofty aims for him: He might function as a helpful companion for elderly folks living on their own, reminding them to take their medication while engaging them in sorely needed conversation. In a care home, Pepper might help keep an eye on residents, entertain them with games and jokes, or simply offer some of the friendly interaction that overstretched staff cannot. In 2018, Pepper himself appeared before the U.K. Parliament, citing his potential to “reduce pressure on health-care services” and “boost independence, reduce loneliness, and improve the quality of life among elderly people.” The following year, the U.K. government cited Pepper when it announced that it would invest 34 million pounds in developing care robots that “could revolutionise [the] UK care system.”

[Read: The robot revolution in caregiving]

But Pepper has yet to make it very far out of the lab. He and other social robots have been tested out in care settings in multiple countries over the past decade, but very few nursing homes actually own one. Hard data are hard to come by, but Chris Papadopoulos, an expert in health technology at the University of Bedfordshire, guesses that fewer than one in 1,000 U.K. care homes uses a humanoid robot on an ongoing basis. A city council in England made headlines in 2017 when it recruited Pepper to work in its adult-social-care team, but when I called their office to ask how he was getting along, the woman who answered the phone had no idea what I was talking about. Likewise, media portrayals of seemingly widespread use of robotics in Japanese care homes have little basis in reality, James Wright, a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and the author of Robots Won’t Save Japan, told me. About 10 percent of care homes in Japan use any sort of robot—including monitoring systems or mobility aids—let alone a humanoid. Production of Pepper was paused in 2020 due to lack of demand. (Aldebaran was eventually acquired by United Robotics Group, which still advertises Pepper as “an ally in Healthcare” that can “interact, entertain and provide companionship,” “enhance the efficiency of the administrative process, improve quality and consistency of patient experience” and “support caregivers.”)

There are likely many reasons that the long-predicted robot takeover of elder care has yet to take off. Robots are expensive, and cash-strapped care homes don’t have money lying around to purchase a robot, let alone to pay for the training needed to actually use one effectively. And at least so far, social robots just aren’t worth the investment, Wright told me. Pepper can’t do a lot of the things people claimed he could—and he relies heavily on humans to help him do what he can. Despite some research suggesting they can boost well-being among the elderly, robots have shown little evidence that they make life easier for human caregivers. In fact, they require quite a bit of care themselves. Perhaps robots of the future will revolutionize caregiving as hoped. But the care robots we have now don’t even come close, and might even exacerbate the problems they’re meant to solve.

Some researchers have not given up on Pepper. “There are so many benefits to continual contact and interaction that we are unable to provide to our elderly because of health-care-worker shortages,” Arshia Khan, a roboticist at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, told me. Her lab deployed a fleet of Peppers into eight nursing homes in Minnesota in 2022. She admits that the robots have limitations—they can’t perform physical care yet—but Khan believes that lives would have been saved during the coronavirus pandemic if more elderly people had had robots to interact with when they couldn’t be with others. “Loneliness doesn’t just make a person feel depressed. It actually kills,” Khan said.

There is, to be clear, no evidence that care robots can save lives. And although some research suggests that social robots reduce loneliness or otherwise improve well-being, the conclusion comes with a few asterisks. Many studies involve robotic pets—usually Paro, a soft robotic seal designed to soothe and stimulate people with dementia—not humanoids. Many of the studies are bad: Multiple meta-analyses have lamented that studies on social robots have methodological issues that make it difficult to know what to make of the results.

Even higher-quality studies on humanoids such as Pepper have some limitations to consider. As part of a large collaboration between the European Union and Japan, Papadopoulos conducted a study that tested a “culturally competent” version of Pepper. In practice, that meant loading Pepper with knowledge about the local culture—at an English nursing home, Pepper might talk about rugby, for example—and then installing him in residents’ rooms for up to 18 hours over the course of two weeks. Compared with those who weren’t around a robot, residents who got to hang out with Pepper—particularly the “culturally competent” version—reported a boost in emotional well-being. Of course, that doesn’t mean Pepper was actually satisfying residents’ need for human connection: Residents’ self-reported loneliness didn’t significantly improve. In fact, Papadopoulos told me that many residents were initially wary that Pepper might replace human caregivers but came around to him as it became obvious that was “absolutely impossible.” Instead, they saw him “as more of a fun, assistive therapeutic bit of kit … like a television or an iPad or something,” he said.

Whatever care robots’ impact on well-being, multiple studies have found that, far from easing the demands on human caregivers, they can create additional work for them. The most obvious reason is that introducing a social robot into a care home means bringing a fragile machine into a setting full of fragile people. Leaving Pepper or other such devices lying around is simply not an option, because they and residents risk harming each other. As part of the research for his book, Wright spent six weeks in a Japanese care home that was testing out Pepper; the robot was stored away when not in use and closely monitored when he was.

Potential safety issues aside, Pepper didn’t seem to work terribly well without help, Wright told me. Initially, the plan was for Pepper to run exercise classes with residents. “The staff members found out very quickly that if they just let Pepper stand at the front of the room and do its thing, basically, the residents would kind of ignore it,” Wright said. A caregiver had to stand next to Pepper, repeating its words and mimicking its movements to get the residents involved.

Naonori Kodate, an associate professor in social policy and social robotics at University College Dublin, observed something similar while producing a documentary about care robots in Japan; the social robots did seem to get the residents talking and boost morale in the home—but only with some elbow grease from staff. “It’s not like you can just leave the robots and then all the people speak to them and have fun together,” Kodate told me. In fact, to be of much use at all, the robots often needed the help of a human who really knew the residents well.

[Read: The friends who are caring for each other in old age]

The nursing home where Wright conducted his field work also tested Paro, the cuddly seal robot, which was designed for regular handling. The hope was that such a hands-off robot might help soothe the home’s more agitated residents and thus cut down on some of the attention they required from staff members. (Paro’s manufacturer does not advertise it as a labor-saving device; it emphasizes Paro’s capacity to reduce patient and caregiver stress, and to enhance socialization of patients with one another and with caregivers.) Paro didn’t seem to interest the home’s neediest residents much, but others became so enamored with it that staff became concerned. One woman in particular seemed to develop a fixation with the robot, taking any opportunity to wheel Paro back to her room, where she’d put it to bed like a baby and often cry while talking to it. She refused to take meals or go to bed without Paro. So the staff started keeping tabs on who was using Paro when and for how long. “In the end, it just got put on a shelf, because it was easier to do that than to constantly monitor everybody,” Wright told me.

These types of challenges are likely underreported. Care workers are largely overlooked in research on care technology, Cian O’Donovan, a researcher at University College London who is leading a project aimed at developing robotics that empower care workers, told me. One review of research studies on robots in assisted-living facilities noted that the majority of studies do not collect data on the experiences of caregiving staff with the robots, instead focusing on residents’ experiences.

Papadopoulos and his team did consult staff as part of their project, and the concern that Pepper might create additional work for caregivers didn’t come up. But that might be because, as a result of various safety and ethical concerns, the researchers were doing the monitoring themselves, and staff were instructed to carry on as though the robots weren’t there. Such oversight is a common feature of this sort of research. One widely cited study reportedly found that Paro reduced loneliness in the elderly even more effectively than their usual activities did, such as going on a bus trip or playing bingo—but the team tested him in one-hour group sessions guided by a researcher or member of staff. Multiple studies investigating robots’ effect on well-being and loneliness employed a “Wizard of Oz” approach in which all of the robot’s questions and answers were keyed in by a human at a laptop out of sight. The tightly regulated nature of these studies adds an important caveat to their findings: Social robots seem to improve well-being under the careful watch of humans.

Some of the researchers I spoke with are certain that whatever shortcomings Pepper has will be overcome with better technology. Both Khan and Papadopoulos see a future in which robots can do anything a human caregiver can. Recent developments in AI are already allowing social robots to engage in more sophisticated conversation. Even the physical limitations of modern robots are on the precipice of being solved. Papadopoulos pointed me to Google’s newly released Mobile Aloha, a comparatively low-cost robot that researchers have trained to cook shrimp and wash laundry.

[Read: The new casualties of automation]

Other researchers are far more skeptical. Caring for someone isn’t as simple as jumping to do their bidding. Even a robot that can have a satisfying interaction with an elderly person may nevertheless fail to care for them. Paro successfully captivated the woman in the home where Wright did his field work, but only a human caregiver recognized that her reliance on it had curdled into something self-destructive. It’s not just a human touch that Pepper lacks, but a human perspective and the capacity to act on it.

Caregiving is not the fulfillment of a set of discrete tasks; it’s the management of someone’s quality of life. The sort of knowledge required to do it well is person- and community-specific. Kodate told me that he was fascinated by the subtlety of information caregivers relied on to ascertain desires, frustrations, and needs that individuals themselves might not know or cannot express. That’s why care is done best in the context of strong relationships.

The robots we have now may offer a glimpse of both the promise and peril of what care robots could come to be. Most researchers I spoke with saw potential for robotic technology to assist and even bolster a strong caring relationship, but they were doubtful it could ever supplant one. If they are correct, then even future, more capable robots could lead us down a very strange path. Pepper and Paro did not alleviate the demands of caregiving, but they did change them. Carers spent less time interacting with residents and more time monitoring resident interactions with robots. Instead of coming up with their own exercise routines, they mimicked Pepper’s. In other words, care itself became more “robotic,” Wright noted in his book. That’s an attractive prospect from a business standpoint; minimizing the intimacy of care could make the humans who do it more interchangeable. But such a robotic revolution in caregiving would succeed only by further imperiling the relationships that overstrapped and underpaid carers already struggle so much to build.

Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World’s Richest Country

2024-01-05T09:00:52-05:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

One morning a couple of years ago, during the awkward hour between my eldest daughter’s school drop-off and her sister’s swim lesson, I stopped at a coffee shop. There, I ran into the father of a boy in my daughter’s class. He was also schlepping a younger child around, and as we got to talking, I learned that we had a lot in common.

Like me, he had followed his spouse to the United Kingdom for work; she was a physician, learning some new procedure to take back to Australia. He couldn’t wait to move home to his big house down the road from the beach. “Do you think you’ll ever move back to the U.S.?” he asked. Sure, eventually, I said. Or at least that was the plan.

What he said next threw me: His wife had recently been offered a job in America. “It would have been great for her career,” he said, “but we figured it would be too dangerous for the kids.”

I can’t remember what I said in response—probably something about things not being quite as bad as they seem on the news. But his comment, and the matter-of-fact way he said it, stuck with me.

For most of my life, I have never felt anything but extreme, what-are-the-odds gratitude to have been born and raised in America. We have so much: a high median income and larger-than-average houses and some of the world’s most prestigious colleges and universities. When I tell people in the U.K. that I’ve moved there from the U.S., many respond with something to the effect of “Why on earth would you do that?”

But their tone changes a little when I mention having kids. American parents have something of a reputation in Europe. We’re known for being intense, neurotic, overprotective, obsessed with academic achievement—“the opposite of relaxed,” Matthias Doepke, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, told me. Some Europeans worry that American child-rearing norms will take hold there. Yet many of the parents I’ve spoken with also express some sympathy, or even pity, for American parents. They seem bewildered by how little support new parents receive in the U.S., and horrified by the prevalence of gun violence in American life.

Of course, people in many other parts of the world experience levels of poverty, violence, and instability that are far worse. By that measure, many Americans are indeed very lucky. But the United States is a rich country, and it could afford to alleviate some of the challenges its parents face. Instead, the U.S. mostly regards children, and the vital task of raising them, as a personal matter.

[Read: Parental leave is American exceptionalism at its bleakest]

If you have children in America, it is up to you to keep them safe, healthy, and well cared for. This philosophy shapes government policy in some obvious ways: The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world without guaranteed paid maternity leave. Compared with the rest of the OECD, an international coalition of 38 nations—most of them wealthy—it spends far less on direct cash benefits for families (which the U.S. briefly experimented with more broadly during the early pandemic but then abandoned), as well as on early education and child care. Statutory paid vacation, sick leave, caregiving leave, and pension credits for caregivers are all common in OECD countries but absent in America.

I’ve come to understand that Australian dad’s logic: America is a land of incredible opportunity, but it’s not a great place to raise kids.

The job of raising children is simply different in the U.S. It comes with fewer assurances and requires navigating a level of precarity that is unique in the developed world.

It is, in a word, harder.

To me, the American ideal of “having it all”—that is, working a full-time job while raising children—always seemed like way too much. So when I finished graduate school with a baby in tow, I sought out part-time work that I hoped to scale up when my kids got older.

But the sort of work you can do part-time in America is generally not the sort that offers any leave or that can cover the cost of child care for two kids. When I gave birth to my second daughter, in 2018, I left my job entirely. This was by no means a disaster—my husband has a great job with excellent health insurance—but it was daunting to entirely lose my foothold in the labor market. I spent my first year at home trying to start a freelance writing career but didn’t get very far. Then, at the end of 2019, we moved to the United Kingdom.

Among the wealthy, postindustrial nations that make up America’s peers, England is hardly the most supportive for parents. Brits sometimes describe their country as a kind of halfway point between Europe and America, and that’s certainly true for family policy. But with a full year of job-protected leave, up to 39 weeks of which is paid; cash stipends for parents; tax-free child-care funds; paid vacation and sick leave; universal health care; and a right to request flexible working arrangements, there is far more support for parents in the U.K. than in the U.S. I don’t qualify for some of these benefits due to my visa status, but all kids, including mine, are entitled to at least 570 hours of early-childhood education or child care per year from age 3 to 4, and most children start full-time school a year earlier than American kindergarten.

With this help, I was able to give freelancing another go. I’m now living my dream of having a career that allows me to pick my daughters up from school every day, and I owe it in no small part to the subsidized child care in England. I would not be writing this article without it.

I still find parenting overwhelming and difficult at times, even though I know I’ve got it better than most people. But there’s a different feel to parenting over here—more sure-footed and secure—and it took me a while to figure out why. It’s the sense that my children’s welfare is not all on me and my husband. That is, after all, what a policy like paid parental leave represents: the conviction that parents deserve support, that the work of raising a country’s next generation of citizens should be a collective enterprise. When the government instead leaves parents to look for employers willing to tolerate their care responsibilities, it sends a clear message: your kids, your problem.

(Kuni Takahashi / Getty)

Take the example of Dina, who was born in Africa and works in higher education. When she found out she was pregnant, everyone in her and her husband’s extended families abroad assumed that she would have paid maternity leave. (Dina asked to be identified by her first name only so that she could speak openly about her leave experience.) But her academic job at the time offered no paid leave, and because she hadn’t been there for a full year when she gave birth, she didn’t even qualify for unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). This is something I encountered repeatedly in speaking with women for this article—the fact that they had switched jobs during their pregnancy or worked part-time rendered them ineligible for any job-protected leave, which isn’t how it works in many other countries.

[Read: The U.S. leaves parents on their own for a reason]

By the time Dina gave birth, she had accumulated just three days of paid time off. She scheduled her C-section for the Friday before the last week of the 2020 fall term so that she would have the weekend to recover before diving back into grading and research for the rest of her school’s winter break.

When the spring term started, she went back to teaching—virtually, due to the pandemic—at five weeks postpartum, still in pain from her C-section, pumping and nursing through six hours of class. Even so, Dina told me, in some ways she felt “lucky.” That her due date came so close to winter break was a stroke of good fortune; COVID-19 “saved” her, she said, because it allowed her to teach from home.

Another mother I spoke with, Patricia Green, was working as a home-health aide for a company serving people with disabilities when she found out she was pregnant. One of her clients would sometimes get violent and hit her belly, so Green sought out a new job at another agency. Like Dina, the fact that she started working there midpregnancy meant that she didn’t qualify for the FMLA. And even if she had been eligible, she needed the money, which meant that she had to go back to work two weeks postpartum, even though she didn’t have anyone she trusted to watch her child. “I feel like I was just kind of forced to go back to work, and I was not ready,” Green told me. “I would constantly be thinking about the safety of my child.”

Work-family conflicts continue throughout a child’s life—and, unsurprisingly, put the most strain on financially vulnerable mothers. Amanda Freeman, a sociologist at the University of Hartford who conducted a yearslong study of low-income mothers in America, told me that all of the women she surveyed were working, often multiple part-time jobs that not only paid poorly but also offered few benefits and none of the flexibility necessary to coordinate employment and parenting. Just-in-time scheduling, in which employers post employees’ schedules with very little notice and can change it at the last minute, made it difficult to arrange child care or, for that matter, any other aspect of their child’s life. “Sometimes they’ll pay for child care, which they can’t afford anyway, and then not have a shift,” Freeman said. The mothers Freeman interviewed worried about their kids getting sick—or about falling ill themselves—because few of them had any sick leave, which meant that if they called out of work, they lost money and potentially their job.

One mother I spoke with, Mendy Hughes, has worked at Walmart for more than 13 years. For many years, her employer only allowed her to work night shifts, sometimes until midnight, so she would bring her 10-year-old son to work when she couldn’t find someone to watch him. “I can’t call in,” she told me. “He had to get up and go to school the next day.”

On top of all this, many of the women Freeman interviewed depended on various forms of means-tested social assistance that are issued for brief and varied intervals and subject to stringent income limits and work requirements. Hanging on to them requires, among other things, regularly reporting detailed information about their earnings or work-related activities, creating an additional axis of work-family conflict. This triple load of work, parenting, and navigating public benefits is a direct by-product of America’s view of public support for parents as something you are not supposed to need, Freeman told me. It’s not something that happens when programs are universal.

To lose work in America is to lose not only your income and the child care it pays for but also practically everything else: your health insurance, your company’s retirement-savings plan, and, potentially, Social Security benefits. Even much of the social safety net—the earned-income tax credit, the refundable portion of the child tax credit, and often Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, what we usually think of as “welfare”—is tied to work. What help is left for those with little or no income is sparse, patchy, and difficult to access (and retain). If American families can’t find a way to juggle work and parenting in spite of all the obstacles, they have a lot to lose and very far to fall.

And people do fall. At least one in 10 Americans has medical debt; one study found that postpartum women, more than one in 10 of whom are uninsured, are significantly overrepresented among them. Nearly 5 percent of children in America have no health insurance, and, by one estimate, a third of children are underinsured. Even though the health system in the U.K. has problems, parents there and in other countries with universal health care don’t have to hesitate to seek care for their kids for fear they won’t be able to afford it.

American families are also more likely to live in poverty than those in most other OECD countries. And as Jane Waldfogel, a professor of social work at Columbia University, told me, “It’s not just that we have more poor kids, but that the penalty to being poor is stronger.” For one thing, kids who grow up in poverty in the U.S. are four times more likely to be poor as adults than those in Denmark or Germany, and twice as likely as those in the U.K. or Australia.

A memorial display for the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 (Zhang Chuanshi / Xinhua / Redux)

And then there’s the threat American parents have to worry about that pretty much doesn’t exist in many of the United States’s peer countries: guns. According to one analysis, from birth to 18, kids in the U.S. are nearly twice as likely to die as kids in a set of other wealthy countries—and the No. 1 cause of death is gun violence. Firearms are responsible for 20 percent of all U.S. child and teen deaths; the average among other comparably large and wealthy countries is less than 2 percent. Yet even that shocking statistic understates the degree to which guns distort childhood and complicate parenthood.

[Read: No parent should have to live like this]

The prevalence of gun violence is the reason Kayla Perry, who moved from the U.S. to Singapore in 2019, plans never to move back home. Born and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, Perry’s first brush with gun violence occurred when snipers spent three weeks in 2002 shooting people across the greater Washington, D.C., area. Their first victim was the father of one of her classmates. Perry heard the news when a fellow student passed her a note in French class, minutes before the school went into lockdown. Everything about school life was strange that month, she remembers—they weren’t allowed to go out for recess, and no one stood outside at the bus stop. Perry was never a direct victim or survivor of firearm violence, yet it shaped her worldview. She recalled a time when, while walking home from school, she and her friends heard what they thought was a gunshot. “We all ran in zigzags all the way home, because it’s the best way to avoid a shooter,” she told me. “Looking back, like, how sad is it that a kid that age has that fear?”

American childhood today is indelibly shaped by that fear. School shootings have been rising in the past few decades; according to one count, in 2022, 40 people were killed and 100 more injured in 51 shootings. And even though most students will never encounter a school shooter, the pervasive threat and all of the countermeasures—the drills and metal detectors and bulletproof backpacks—produce a sense of unsafety at school. For parents, the unrelenting fear that your child could fall victim to a shooter is a source of anxiety, always there in the back of your mind.

But school shootings, and the defensive apparatus that has built up around them, are only the most visible way that firearm violence has warped American childhood. They represent a tiny fraction of gun deaths. Once, while Perry was home for winter break during her freshman year of college, her neighbor was shot in his driveway during an armed robbery. No one died, and Perry mostly accepted the swirling threat of gun violence as an ordinary part of life. “You could get in a car crash; you could get in a plane crash; you could be shot … That’s just normal life,” she said.

Only when she moved away did she fully appreciate how unusual widespread gun violence is in other parts of the world, or start to wonder what it would be like to grow up without it. Perry doesn’t have children yet, but she wants them—and that’s why she’s decided she will not move back to the United States. She wants her future kids to live in a country where they don’t need to worry about firearms.

For a year during the pandemic, I found myself in the somewhat strange position of writing a weekly roundup of parenting advice for an American audience from my perch overseas. I remember reading an article published after the Uvalde massacre, meant to give American parents data-driven advice on how to protect their kids. The author accurately noted that the overwhelming majority of children who die by gun violence aren’t killed at school. Nearly a third of deaths from firearms among minors are suicides. Among kids under 13, nearly half of gun deaths and injuries are accidental.

Nothing epitomizes U.S. individualism quite like widespread gun ownership—and nothing more clearly illustrates the impossible burdens that individualism inevitably places on parents. No amount of tragedy has yet convinced Americans to set aside their guns, so instead we saddle parents with the absurd task of protecting their children from other gun owners while also ensuring that the child never stumbles across a gun.

All of this might help explain why American parents act the way they do.

In many parts of the world, parenting has gotten more intense, and childhood has become less free. But the all-consuming nature of American child-rearing is extreme compared with many other countries, Doepke, the economics professor, told me. In the U.S., for example, preschool is much more academic. (While searching for summer camps last year, I stumbled on a “USA-style” camp where kids can learn to code.) In the Nordic region and elsewhere, early care settings are more focused on playing in nature. “If you live in Stockholm and do the American thing of teaching numbers and letters to your kids and signing them up for violin at age 4, then your Swedish friends will tell you that is almost child abuse,” Doepke said.

This meddling style of parenting may have started out as an idiosyncrasy of the upper classes, but it has become the norm—or at least the aspiration—for many American parents. We see it not only in that early academic pressure but also in the way moms and dads devour parenting advice, and the high degree of surveillance kids are subjected to. But, of course, not everyone has the time and resources to meet these standards. Amanda Freeman told me that every parent in her survey of low-income mothers was aware of intensive-parenting norms; most were desperate to replicate them and ashamed when they couldn’t.

[Read: The gravitational pull of supervising kids all the time]

Hannes Schwandt, an economist at Northwestern University, told me that in many communities in Switzerland, where he used to teach, accompanying children on their walk to school was generally frowned upon. By comparison, American children seem to be raised as if they were in a “combat zone,” Schwandt said. Perry noted something similar in Singapore—kids there are extremely focused on academics (many go to after-school school), but they also have a tremendous amount of freedom from a young age, riding the metro or going to the mall on their own.

It’s ironic that in a country so committed to freedom, children have so little of it; that in a society so committed to personal responsibility and self-reliance, children can do so little for themselves. But perhaps that’s not a coincidence. In their book, Love, Money, and Parenting, Doepke and his co-author, Fabrizio Zilibotti, argue that much of the variation among wealthy nations in parenting styles has economic roots. The emphasis that parents across the world put on hard work (relative to values such as independence and imagination) lines up remarkably well with their country’s economic inequality. About 9 in 10 Chinese parents and two-thirds of American parents place hard work among the most important values to pass along to children. In Sweden, it’s 11 percent. This makes a lot of sense: Parents everywhere want to set their kids up for success, but “the economic environment really shapes what that means,” Doepke said.

Pushing your kids to do well in school and filling out their free time with extracurriculars that will help their college applications might be tough on children, but if you live in the U.S., it is still likely the rational thing to do. The risks, both physical and financial, of taking a hands-off approach to parenting are simply higher in America than in pretty much any other comparably wealthy country.

This, I think, is the quandary I find myself in when weighing whether to return to the United States: I don’t know that I can move back to America without becoming an American parent. The task of raising a child is always uncertain and daunting, even under the best of circumstances. But when you sign up to be a parent in the U.S., you are signing up to navigate threats to your kids’ safety and your family’s financial stability that you would not have to consider if you lived in any comparable country. There’s no opting out of these stressors; they’re part of the job.

My husband and I still plan to move back to the U.S. at some point. We want to be near our families—and will need to be, eventually, in order to help care for our parents as they age. We always assumed that moving closer to family members who can help out with our kids would make parenting easier. But I don’t know if my relatives’ support would be enough to offset the feeling that my country doesn’t have my family’s back. It’s a tragic thought: that moving home is not what’s best for my family. But it’s one I cannot shake.

America Isn’t Ready for the Two-Household Child

2023-12-08T07:00:00-05:00

For most of American history, when parents separated, their kids almost always ended up living with just one of them. But recent studies have confirmed a new era: Joint physical custody, in which a child resides with each parent a significant portion of the time, has become dramatically more common in the U.S.

The trend was first documented in Wisconsin, where court data revealed that the percentage of divorces leading to equal joint custody—in which time with each parent is split 50–50—rose from just 2 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in 2010. Even among never-married Wisconsin couples who came to court to establish child support—a group in which the prevalence of shared custody is, perhaps unsurprisingly, low—shared arrangements doubled from 2003 to 2013. And a 2022 study found that, nationally, the share of divorces resulting in joint custody jumped from 13 percent before 1985 to 34 percent in the early 2010s. (We don’t have the data to assess custody arrangements among never-married couples nationwide.) Although the increase is steepest among high-income couples, it’s happening across the socioeconomic spectrum, Daniel Meyer, a social-work professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies child custody, told me.

The same change appears to be happening in Europe: The prevalence of equal joint custody roughly doubled from the mid-2000s to 2021, according to a study published earlier this year. The rate of shared custody varies massively among European countries, but it seems to be rising in many of them.

On average, children in shared arrangements tend to fare slightly better than those in sole custody on a variety of metrics, including life satisfaction, stress levels, and self-esteem. But the couples that share custody are usually wealthier, better educated, and have a less fraught relationship with each other, which makes sense: Even in an unequal joint arrangement, a child must be housed, fed, and cared for in two places—which usually requires duplicating expenses. Coordination is needed to transport the kid back and forth. Whether the better outcomes associated with joint custody reflect the arrangement itself or the conditions that make it possible is unclear, Meyer told me. And of course, in some situations—if one parent is abusive or unstable, for example—sole custody is in fact what’s best for the child.

Regardless of whether it’s the right outcome for a given separation, though, joint custody is a growing reality—one that our systems for accounting for and supporting families aren’t built to accommodate. Americans may be ready for the two-household child, but American public policy isn’t.

[Read: The high cost of divorce]

In America’s earliest years, custody of children, who were largely considered property, was typically granted exclusively to fathers following divorce. But as the nation industrialized and men began working outside the home, women developed a distinct role in domestic matters—and a stronger claim to their children. Over the course of the 19th century, sole maternal custody became the near-universal outcome of divorce. But both arrangements were rooted in the conviction that custody is “indivisible,” as J. Herbie DiFonzo, a law professor at Hofstra University, once wrote. A child may have two parents, but only one household.

That bedrock assumption has made it difficult for researchers to track the rise of joint custody in the first place. In the rare cases where national surveys ask about a parent outside of a given household, they don’t usually clarify whether or how often the child is actually residing with them, Molly Costanzo, a scientist at the Institute for Research on Poverty, told me. This makes it hard to know how joint-custody kids, whose parents could both report that the child is living with them, are showing up in data sets. “I’m sure there are instances where they’re double counted,” Katherine Michelmore, a public-policy professor at the University of Michigan, told me. To be fair, constructing surveys that capture the complexities of joint custody is difficult. Anecdotally, we know that such arrangements tend to be highly fluid, shifting throughout the year during summer breaks and holidays, and over time as kids age.

The recent Wisconsin and national data provide the clearest picture yet that shared custody is rising in prominence. In one sense, this development is hardly surprising. As more couples take a more egalitarian approach to family life—with mothers working and fathers involved in child care—more are carrying that dynamic into separation as well, Mia Hakovirta, a social-work professor at the University of Turku, in Finland, told me. This helps explain why famously egalitarian Sweden is the only country in Europe—and likely the world—where the majority of parents who live separately share custody of their kids.

Over time, and often with pressure from fathers’-advocacy groups, legal systems in Europe and America have adapted to facilitate or even encourage shared custody. And at least in the U.S., courts tasked with ordering child support, Costanzo told me, have started taking custody arrangements into consideration. Our social policies, unfortunately, do not.

Consider the earned income tax credit (EITC), a refundable tax credit available to low-income Americans. The refund is substantially larger for those claiming a dependent child—but a child can be claimed only once each year. That makes some sense in a sole-custody arrangement (though some people would argue that a “noncustodial father” paying child support shouldn’t be treated like a single, childless adult). In a joint-custody arrangement, it creates confusion about which parent is entitled to claim the credit—and ultimately a lopsided scenario in which two adults regularly house and care for a child while only one gets state help.

[Read: The great, overlooked tax policy for getting people to work]

This problem has no obvious solution. Perhaps both parents should be able to claim a shared child for the purposes of the tax credit; New York, for example, already has what’s called a “noncustodial parent EITC” available to parents paying child support. Something of the sort could be adapted at the federal level for parents sharing custody. But treating single parents sharing custody and those with sole custody in the same manner might be unfair. Splitting a child’s care with a co-parent can afford more time for leisure and paid work than managing it all yourself.

Another approach, Michelmore told me, would be to base eligibility for the credit solely on a worker’s income, without factoring in their dependents—and then award a “child benefit” for all kids, as many European countries do. Such an allowance would theoretically be easier to split across two households, though that’s rarely an option in practice. In Germany, Anja Steinbach, a professor of sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen, told me, the child benefit is sent to the house where the child is registered; as in most countries, there can only be one and it’s usually the mom’s. And even if Germany enabled parents to split the allowance—as dual-residence parents in Norway can—that benefit would still go a lot further in one household than in two. Some Germans have argued that the child benefit should be more generous for dual-residence families to account for their greater costs.

Joint custody raises these sorts of complications for any program for which one’s eligibility depends on the presence of a child in their home. That includes most benefits targeting people with low incomes—even those that, at face value, have nothing to do with kids. Take Medicaid, the public health-insurance program for Americans with limited means. In most states, an adult’s eligibility is determined by whether their income falls below 133 percent of the federal poverty level, a cutoff that varies by the size of the individual’s household; the size of their household hinges on who they expect to claim as a dependent on their tax return. Again, each child can be claimed only once.

Figuring out an equitable path forward for joint custody will force the U.S. to ponder some fundamental questions about what it means to be a family, what constitutes parenting, what the government’s role is in supporting it, and how much of it one has to do before being entitled to such assistance. The answers won’t be straightforward, but two-household children are already here. There’s no sense in ignoring them any longer.

The Other Work Remote Workers Get Done

2023-09-01T10:40:39-04:00

Carolyn Vigil has spent most of her career in Big Tech. She is also the primary caregiver for her 23-year-old autistic son, Jax. Managing these two roles has never been easy, and at various times over the years, Vigil has had to step back from her job for the sake of her kid. It is somewhat remarkable that when schools shut down during the pandemic and Vigil became not only her son’s carer but also his teacher, she didn’t quit her job. “That was definitely challenging,” she told me, but because she was working from home, “I was able to juggle it.” She’s continued working remotely ever since, largely because her son is no longer in school and, though he is semi-independent, he still needs help managing his daily tasks: taking his medications, managing his diet and exercise, and traveling to doctor appointments. So Vigil was distressed when, earlier this year, her company announced that it was calling workers back to the office.

Predicting the future of remote work is hard. On one hand, many American workers really like it and want to be working remotely even more than they are now (though, of course, many workers have never had the option to work from home). And while the amount of work in the U.S. being done remotely is down from its pandemic high, it’s been holding steady near 28 percent for about a year now. In a tight labor market, many employers opted to embrace at least some remote work to help with recruitment and retention.

On the other hand, many employers are getting more vocal about their desire to have employees in the office more often. Vigil’s company is one of many—including Apple, Disney, AT&T, JPMorgan Chase, Dell, Meta, Comcast, Goldman Sachs, FedEx, Walmart, and BlackRock—that have walked back their remote-work policies this year. In August, the White House ordered Cabinet members to “aggressively” prioritize a shift back to the office this fall so that “all of us will benefit from the increases in morale, teamwork, and productivity that come from in-person work.” Even Zoom, the company whose video-calling tech facilitates so much remote work, is requiring many of its workers to return to the office part-time on the grounds that the company sees in-person work as more effective.

[Read: Why managers fear a remote-work future]

The shift seems to reflect a concern long voiced by executives and managers and backed up by some recent research: that remote work is hampering productivity. One study found that data-entry workers who worked remotely in India were 18 percent less productive than their in-office counterparts. Another working paper published in July found that fully remote workers were about 10 percent less productive than their in-person counterparts (though hybrid work seemed to have no significant effect on productivity).

The appeal of remote work is all too often glossed over as a matter of “quality of life” or “work-life balance.” Those are, of course, important. But that framing also ignores the uncompensated caregiving that Vigil and millions of others provide for America’s young, sick, elderly, and disabled. Their efforts are not just a quality-of-life issue; they’re an enormously important and overlooked part of our economy. For a lot of caregivers, telecommuting allows them to manage a workload that is, if anything, way too big. Remote work, then, isn’t just a question of work-life balance; it’s a question of work-work balance. The traditional conception of “productivity” doesn’t account for this.

For years, feminist economists have complained that the primary methods by which we measure the size and health of the economy leave a whole lot out. GDP, for example, primarily measures goods and services bought and sold in the market economy, excluding those produced by households. Our entire economy hinges on human labor, but the unpaid work that goes into raising a productive laborer is absent from economic indicators. When someone like Vigil leaves their job to care for a family member full-time, they are considered economically inactive. Apart from the money parents and taxpayers spend on children’s care and education, human capital “just sort of pops up” in the national accounts as a fully grown, hard-working citizen, Julie P. Smith, an honorary associate professor at the Australian National University who has written extensively on this topic, told me.

All of this makes for a distorted picture of the economy. Because household production counts for nothing in national accounts, the bump in GDP that results when production shifts into the formal market, such as when a stay-at-home mother enrolls her child in day care and starts a full-time job, is exaggerated. We witnessed the reverse of this during the pandemic—one recent report found that when you account for unpaid household production, the drop in economic activity that occurred during the pandemic was much less severe. This makes sense; a lot of the work previously done by paid laborers didn’t go away—it just shifted into the home. “Instead of going out to a restaurant and eating a meal … a family cooked their own meal in their home. And when they cook their own meal in their home, all of a sudden, they disappear from economic indicators, even though somebody still had to put in the work to, you know, cut the vegetables and cook the meat or fish or whatever it is,” Misty Heggeness, a professor at the University of Kansas who is working on a dashboard aimed at quantifying the care economy, told me. That makes a difference to the restaurant business but not as much to the nation’s productivity as a whole.

Heggeness thinks the lack of comprehensive data on this sort of work is part of why experts took so long to wrap their head around the so-called she-cession. Many assumed that the increased child care brought on by school closures would disproportionately oust mothers from the labor market. It wasn’t until pretty late in the game that it became clear that risk had been overstated. “We’re not good at telling the comprehensive story of the economy, because we completely ignore all the economic activity that is done within homes,” Heggeness said.

[Read: The pandemic exposed the inequality of American motherhood]

How we measure—or mismeasure—the economy inevitably influences policy making. “What we measure reflects what we value, and shapes what we do,” Smith and her co-author, Nancy Folbre, wrote in a 2020 paper on the subject. The omission of so much domestic work from economic indicators makes policies that support caregiving look like bad investments. Both breastmilk and formula are suitable sources of nutrition for newborns—but only the latter has any economic value as far as GDP is concerned. If an expansion of paid parental leave allowed more new mothers to breastfeed their kids more and rely on formula less, the economy would “suffer” as a result. A similar tipping of the scales seems to be playing out in the debate about remote work: The work that the practice is allegedly hampering is overshadowing the work that it enables.

The most obvious benefit of remote work is that it saves people time commuting. Many American workers sink that extra time into their job—others, and particularly those with kids under 14, devote some of it to caregiving. For Sarah White, who works full-time for a pharmaceutical company, the absence of a commute makes managing her son’s complex medical needs far easier. If she worked in the office, each medical appointment would require multiple trips between home, school, the office, and the doctor. But because her son’s school is three blocks from her home, midday appointments are pretty simple. “I can pop in my car, take him to his appointment, pop him right back to school,” White told me. And she uses slack time throughout her day in a productive manner. “I can throw in laundry and just keep it going … because it’s right next to my office,” she said.

Employers may not like to hear that employees are doing chores on the job, but working in an office doesn’t eliminate downtime—it just restricts how you can use it. Without the option of loading the dishwasher in between meetings, you might chat with a co-worker or check social media. Research backs this up: A survey of workers from June found that those working from home were more likely than their office counterparts to run a personal errand, care for a child, or do chores during the workday—but slightly less likely to play a phone or computer game or read for leisure.

A subtler point is that when it comes to caregiving, just being nearby is valuable, not because someone needs you at every second but because at any second they might. This is an aspect of caregiving that is all too easy to overlook until something goes wrong. Vigil’s area has seen a string of big storms lately, and she happened to be in the office during a downpour that caused a tree limb to fall in her yard. At home alone, her son panicked. Working from home enables her to ensure that he’s okay—both emotionally and physically—during those sorts of unpredictable events.

[Read: The remote work-fertility connection]

If you account for all of the caring that remote work has made possible, it amounts to an increase in productivity with positive implications for the economy. Compelling evidence suggests that remote work is allowing caregivers to remain employed; it may be why labor-force participation for women with kids under 5 has leapfrogged its pre-pandemic rate. It may also allow workers to do more caregiving. Lynn Abaté-Johnson, who wrote a book about the six years she spent caring for her mother who had cancer, told me she could not have taken on such a large role in her mother’s care if she hadn’t been able to work remotely.

If concerns about our aging population and declining fertility rate are to be believed, then remote work is exactly the kind of thing the United States ought to be embracing. Studies show the flexibility of remote work may be allowing people to have more kids. And even if telework alone can’t raise the fertility rate, it would at least allow more workers to help care for the elderly. Of course, a rethinking of productivity to include care shouldn’t end with embracing remote work. Many other policies, such as paid family and medical leave, paid sick leave, child allowances or cash support for other unpaid caregivers, and predictable and flexible scheduling practices, could ensure that Americans—especially those who can’t work from home—can care for the people in their lives. Even if that means Americans give a little less of their energy to their employers, the greater investment in the people who make up the nation’s economy is worth it.

Vigil eventually managed to obtain a waiver from the return-to-office mandate, but she still goes in once a week or so. When she first read about it in the news, she was forced to consider what she’d do if remaining in the office was her only option. “I really came to the realization that I would probably retire early,” Vigil told me. “I wasn’t really planning to do that yet, but I think it’s that big of a deal for me.” The value of her role as a caregiver is obvious to her, if not to America.

The Gravitational Pull of Supervising Kids All the Time

2023-07-05T11:00:56-04:00

Updated at 4:55 p.m. ET on July 13, 2023

Two Christmases ago, Anna Rollins, a writer based outside Huntington, West Virginia, went on a stroll with her then-5-year-old son. Always itching to do things himself, the boy announced that he wanted to walk alone. When Rollins refused, he countered with a compromise: He would walk on one side of the row of houses, she would walk on the other, and they’d meet at the far end. The trek was only four homes long, in a neighborhood with no through-traffic, so she relented and instructed him to stick to the grass. “This is a good start to independence,” Rollins thought to herself as she walked.

But when she arrived at the meeting spot, her son wasn’t there. She ran around to his side of the block and found it empty. Finally, she spotted him with an elderly couple across the road. “Is this your little boy?” the woman asked as Rollins hurried over. “He was out by himself.” Rollins tried to explain—the boy’s request, the plan, independence—to little avail. “Merry Christmas,” the woman said icily as she handed the boy back. To Rollins, it sounded more like You’re welcome that I rescued your child from your negligent parenting.

Compared with children of generations past, modern American kids tend to live under a high degree of surveillance. That’s not to say they have no autonomy. If anything, children today have more say over what they eat and wear than kids have had through much of history—just very few opportunities for “some degree of risk and personal responsibility away from adults,” as a trio of researchers recently put it.

Many parents have legitimate reasons to worry about their kids wandering. Still, getting out from under close adult supervision is important for child development. Mariana Brussoni, a developmental psychologist and the director of the research center Human Early Learning Partnership, told me that when adults aren’t hovering, children are forced to solve problems and resolve disputes on their own—which can sharpen executive functioning and social-emotional learning, and bolster confidence and resilience.

Independence can also be important for mental health. Separation anxiety, a fear of heights, nervousness about the unknown—those are normal parts of development that serve an evolutionary purpose in keeping kids safe. They don’t dissipate on their own, though; they’re gradually allayed through experiences that draw kids further from parental oversight: spending an afternoon at a friend’s house, climbing a tree, walking to the bus stop by themselves. Learning to cope with the strong emotions that often attend these exploits is valuable. Some psychologists trace the ongoing decline in American children’s mental well-being directly to the constraints on their freedom.

[Read: What happened to American childhood?]

And yet, the vigilant style of American parenting has become not only a norm, but an expectation that can be difficult to defy. In reporting this story, I heard from parents who said that other adults had threatened to call Child Protective Services when they didn’t hold their 3-year-old’s hand as they crossed the street, warned them that their 5- and 7-year-old kids had drifted a little too far from them at a playground, or scolded them for letting their teenage kids walk to school on their own. This social discomfort with childhood independence has become a barrier to it. “I often find myself worrying more about what other people think than I do about my children’s safety,” Rollins told me. “If my children’s safety was the sole thing guiding me, I would probably let them do a lot more.”

This is a common apprehension, Brussoni told me. Parents she speaks with tend to cite three main concerns about giving their children more freedom: cars, kidnapping, and what other people will think or do in response. That creates a vicious cycle: Now that helicopter parenting has become the standard, how does anyone stop?

The decline in children’s independence has complex roots, according to Brussoni. In the mid-to-late 20th century, rising economic inequality undermined parents’ confidence in their children’s future prosperity, spurring an intensive approach to parenting—first among wealthier families, but eventually across classes—in which kids spend more time in structured activities such as violin lessons and hockey practice and less time playing freely. Urbanization and car dominance have made it harder for kids to safely get around on their own, and left fewer opportunities for neighbors to get to know one another, weakening parents’ trust in strangers. The rise of smaller, two-earner families means fewer parents are at home to keep an eye out as kids roam the neighborhood, and fewer older siblings are watching over younger ones. And growing access to frequently fearmongering media has heightened perceptions of the risks that children face in public life.

The resulting encroachment of childhood freedom has had a snowball effect. As kids do less on their own, many of us have come to think of them as less capable of managing on their own, Brussoni said. And with each generation, it becomes harder to imagine that kids can do the sort of things they might have a century ago, because fewer and fewer parents have any memory of having done those things themselves. That’s resulted in a pervasive belief that children require constant supervision into at least their tweens. One recent survey found that more than two-thirds of parents think children should be 12 or older before being left home alone before or after school. Twelve is also the median age at which a kid will be allowed to walk or bike to school or a friend’s house on their own.

Given that so many children are now being accompanied, plenty of adults—parent or not—just aren’t used to seeing young kids on their own anymore; when they encounter a lone child, they often assume, like the elderly couple who pulled Rollins’s son aside, that something’s gone wrong. “We sort of drank the Kool-Aid that anytime a child is unsupervised, they’re ipso facto in danger,” Lenore Skenazy, the president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence, told me.

[Read: How to quit intensive parenting]

More and more, this reality is reflected in America’s infrastructure for safeguarding children against abuse and neglect, Diane Redleaf, a civil-rights lawyer and legal consultant for Let Grow, told me. Reports of child neglect make up the majority of child-maltreatment cases in America. But laws defining neglect in the U.S. are typically broad and vague. Many reports of neglect involve children who have been left without direct supervision for any length of time. Parents have been reported, investigated, and even charged for letting their kids play outside their apartment, walk the dog, or run laps around their block, or for leaving their kid in the car for a few minutes with the windows rolled down on a cool day. The threat of sanction is ever present—especially for Black parents, who are much more likely to get caught up in the CPS system—and it frequently plays into people’s parenting decisions, Redleaf said.

The helicopter-parenting norm is exacerbated, too, by a common uncertainty about the role we should play in the life of a child we don’t personally know. Even capable kids are still learning. For them to participate in society without a chaperone requires some buy-in from everyone else, not only in the form of tolerance for childlike behavior or confusion, but also in a readiness to help or direct a child if need be. Tim Gill, an advocate for children’s play and the author of No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society, suspects that many of us aren’t accustomed to this sort of social contract, given how absent children are from much of public life. “We’re in danger of giving up the notion that it takes a village to raise a child,” Gill told me.

Dixie Dillon Lane, a writer and historian based in Front Royal, Virginia, told me that when she moved to Paris at 11 years old, her parents allowed her to roam the city as she pleased, which was common among her peers there. Lane thinks such autonomy was possible in part because, at least at the time, Parisian adults seemed to have few qualms about instructing an unfamiliar child. On one occasion, when Lane slid into a seat that opened up on a crowded bus, a man standing nearby told her to let an elderly lady sit down instead. In Lane’s experience, many Americans are less certain about the authority they have over a child that isn’t their own. Brussoni said something similar: Bystanders, and especially men, are often wary of interacting with children they don’t know, lest they be suspected of ill intentions. Parents don’t trust strangers, and strangers know it.

[Read: Cities aren’t built for kids]

This “social anxiety about children and their place in society,” as Gill put it, is tricky to walk back. But improving urban infrastructure—narrowing streets to slow down cars, placing family-oriented spaces within walking distance of homes—can make the public realm more child-friendly, Brussoni said. Revising ambiguous child-neglect laws to allow for a reasonable measure of free rein, as eight states have now done, can help ease parents’ hesitation about giving their children some room to roam. Messaging from public-health associations about the importance of childhood independence can influence decisions in schools, libraries, parks, and other public places.

Parents can also try to encourage child autonomy in their own circles. Brussoni, together with several other neighborhood parents, decided to let their children play as they might have in the past. As a result, her kids, who are now in their teens, had much the same childhood she had—spent running around their neighborhood, to the park with their friends, and in and out of one another’s houses. Such a pact can’t encompass everyone who might cross a child’s path, so parents can coach their kids on how to talk to adults they don’t know. This is where Rollins thinks she messed up—she advised her child to avoid the street but didn’t tell him what to say if he encountered a stranger.

Then again, Rollins couldn’t have controlled how other people reacted to her child walking alone. Her experience is part of a larger cultural phenomenon, and cultures don’t shift overnight. For now, giving your child room to take risks might mean taking a risk yourself.

This article originally stated that when someone reports neglect, they typically mean that a child—most commonly between the ages of 5 and 9—has been left without direct supervision. In fact, “lack of supervision” claims do not make up the clear majority of neglect cases, and the most common age range for lack of supervision claims is unclear.

The Problem With Splitting Parental Leave Down the Middle

2023-06-12T13:20:45-04:00

Updated at 4:55 p.m. ET on June 20, 2023

In 2018, when the Norwegian government announced plans to increase fathers’ parental leave by five weeks, many Norwegians were thrilled. Nina Mikkelson, a mother whose then-1-year-old was still nursing, wasn’t one of them. In Norway, paid parental leave is divided into three parts: some reserved for the mother, some for the father, and a third portion that can be used by either parent. Increasing the father’s share meant cutting down the sharable portion, effectively reducing the amount of leave available to mothers by more than a month. And there was talk among some government officials of going further, getting rid of the third discretionary bucket altogether.

Mikkelson posted about her frustrations in a breastfeeding-support Facebook group and found them shared by a number of other women. So she created a new group devoted to protesting the father quota, called “Permisjonen Burde Foreldre Fordele,” or “Leave Should Be Shared by Parents,” reflecting the group’s primary goal: that every family be able to divide their leave as they see fit. The group became active in the comment sections of articles reporting on the reform. After the policy went into effect, the press took interest and the movement against the father quota gained notoriety under a simplified name: Permisjonsopprøret—“Leave Rebellion.”

Paid parental leave has a long history in Europe. Its original purpose was to protect the health of both mother and child. But over the past few decades, encouraging fathers to take leave has become a priority in many countries. The goal is to promote “gender equality in the labor market through promoting gender equality in the division of household work,” Libertad González, an associate professor of economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, told me. In regions all over the world, mothers are more likely than fathers to leave their jobs or reduce their hours at some point after having kids, which significantly reduces their lifetime earnings. The hope is that if more fathers take leave, employers will be less likely to discriminate against women in hiring and promotions, and men will contribute more at home, freeing up mothers to give more time and energy to work.

[Read: Parental leave is American exceptionalism at its bleakest]

The problem is that getting dads to take paternity leave is quite difficult. Making parental leave gender neutral is not enough: In the European countries (as well as in Canada and Australia) where leave is shared or transferable between parents, it’s overwhelmingly taken by mothers. The issue is not necessarily that fathers don’t want to take leave. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many fear professional consequences for doing so, and strong cultural norms still reinforce the idea that women should be primary caregivers, González told me. Many countries have started giving parents little choice in the matter, reserving some amount of leave specifically for fathers on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. The so-called father quota acts as a “progressive lever” that encourages families to break from the traditional mold, González said. Norway is the birthplace of this approach. The country converted its maternity leave to gender-neutral parental leave, most of which could be split between parents as desired, in 1978. But few fathers took any, so in 1993, Norway implemented four weeks of paid parental leave just for dads—and within a few years, most dads were taking it. Sweden did the same two years later, and both countries have expanded their father quotas over time. Many other countries have since followed suit.

But there’s little consensus on how much leave ought to be reserved for fathers. Some groups believe that all leave ought to be equally and nontransferably divided between parents. Only through what advocates call “co-responsibility” of care, the argument goes, can modern societies ever hope to achieve real gender equality. The European Union put out a directive that came into effect last year requiring all of its member states to provide both mothers and fathers with four months each of parental leave, two months of which must be paid and nontransferrable. But though equalizing parental leave seems like a straightforward win for gender equality at home and at work, reserving leave for fathers is not without trade-offs. By design, it leaves couples little choice in how to divvy up their leave, which can pose challenges—mostly for women. Not everyone is on board with such a rigid approach.

The Nordic region has become a model of gender equality for the rest of Europe for good reasons, Ann-Zofie Duvander, a demography professor at Stockholm University and an expert on fathers’ use of parental leave, told me. Norway, Sweden, and Iceland all have very high rates of female labor-force participation, which has been true since before the father quota was implemented. But the quota has likely improved gender equality in the labor market in other direct and indirect ways. Teasing out the degree to which it is responsible for improving women’s career advancement and earnings is tricky—its impact likely manifests gradually and works in conjunction with other family policies—but from Duvander’s perspective, the father quota is undeniably having an effect. If you can’t see that, “you’re living in another reality,” she said.

[Read: Why Icelandic dads take parental leave and Japanese dads don’t]

Elsewhere, however, the intended benefits of paternity leave have been slow to materialize. Spain implemented a two-week father quota in 2007 and has since expanded it to put mothers and fathers on equal footing; as of 2021, both dads and moms get 16 weeks of fully paid and nontransferable leave. González, who has been closely tracking Spain’s leave reform, told me that in a few ways, it’s been a remarkable success. A solid majority of fathers are taking their leave, and since the quota was put in place, Spanish fathers have been doing more child care, both during their leave and after. What’s more, children whose dads were eligible for longer paternity leave have more gender-egalitarian attitudes toward the organization of family life than kids whose fathers had access to only a very short leave.

But at least so far, the expansion of paternity leave hasn’t had much of a lasting effect on women’s employment. Mothers are still far more likely to take unpaid leave or work part-time after their paid leave is up. Meanwhile, “men are taking the leave and then they’re going back to work at the same pace as before,” González told me. “We see no big impact in terms of gender gaps and labor-market outcomes at a societal level.” And there may have been some unintended consequences: The paternity leave did seem to help equalize employment outcomes within a subset of couples, but those couples also went on to have fewer kids overall and divorce at higher rates.

Expanding the father quota doesn’t necessarily make life easier for mothers. Not all men take the leave reserved for them. This is especially true in countries where leave is poorly paid, and in those with more traditional gender norms. But even in the highly gender-egalitarian Nordic countries where leave is well compensated, a nontrivial portion of men don’t use it. The ones who don’t are usually those with the least education and income. Increasing paternity leave does nothing to help a mother whose partner won’t take it, and could actively make her life harder if it comes at the expense of leave she might otherwise take.

Even in cases where a father is willing and able to take some leave, some mothers would prefer to take that time themselves, in many cases because they are still recovering from childbirth or still nursing. In Spain, some mothers resent the government’s decision to devote public resources to expanding paternity leave when they feel like they don’t have enough leave themselves. A group of feminist mothers called the Asociación Petra Maternidades Feministas has argued, among other things, that the government ought to prioritize lengthening the paid leave available to mothers to enable them to breastfeed exclusively for six months, as the World Health Organization recommends.

In Norway, where mothers have up to about seven months of fully paid leave, the women of Leave Rebellion feel this results in too little time to make the transition from breastfeeding to bottles and pumping or formula and solids. “The last couple of weeks of your leave … will be very, very stressful,” Marthe Lilleborge, a founding member of the group, told me. Some women work jobs where pumping or taking breaks to nurse is not possible or practical. Parents can extend their time off with unpaid leave—something a rising number of Norwegian women are doing—but lose some employee benefits, such as pension contributions. A survey undertaken in 2021 to investigate the rise in Norwegian mothers taking unpaid leave found that, on average, fathers are content with a quota of 15 weeks—women say it should be shortened to 11. Duvander told me that people seem mostly happy with the father quota in Sweden—on average, men there actually take more leave than is earmarked for them—but that could have something to do with the fact that leave there is so generous: Even with three months reserved for fathers, mothers are able to take more than a year if they choose. The longer the leave, the more likely women will be willing to share it, Duvander said.

Ensuring both that all birth mothers feel their needs are met and that fathers and mothers take leave in equal measure would likely require giving both parents a lot of leave, which may be out of reach for governments with limited budgets—but not everyone agrees that a perfect 50–50 split of leave ought to be the goal. The women of Leave Rebellion believe that there are plenty of reasonable explanations for why women tend to claim more leave after the birth of a child than fathers: Birthing mothers have very specific needs and responsibilities during the months after a child is born that fathers and non-birthing parents don’t. The experience of the newborn period, like pregnancy or childbirth itself, is inherently unequal. Leaving the choice of how to split up parental leave to each couple and allowing for the possibility of a gender-unequal division is, in their view, the equitable approach. If taking more time out of formal employment to care for children puts mothers at an economic disadvantage, then the government should focus on overhauling the economic system to better value and support caregiving, and going after employers who discriminate against those who do that caregiving. “Don’t go after the babies and the mothers,” Lilleborge told me.

In that sense, the father quota has become a battleground for feminists with differing visions of equality. Mikkelson suspects that although Leave Rebellion failed to reverse Norway’s 2018 leave reform, it seems to have successfully quelled momentum toward splitting Norway’s parental leave down the middle. But in Norway and elsewhere, the father quota will likely continue to divide mothers.

This article has been updated to more accurately reflect Duvander’s perspective on the father quota and to clarify leave compensation in Nordic countries.

Raising a Daughter With a Body Like Mine

2023-05-09T07:30:00-04:00

Updated at 10:55 a.m. ET on May 9, 2023

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

Long before I had any children, I worried about how my eating disorder would affect them. Anorexia is a greedy disease. It has a way of taking over. It wants to be the organizing principle of your life and the lens through which you see the world. That anorexia would have something to say about my children—what I should feed them (in or ex-utero), how I should think of them—seemed inevitable.

I was diagnosed when I was 14 years old. I think of that time of my life as the raising of a pendulum that, when dropped, sent me careening between extremes for years to come. It has never quite settled in the middle, but by now, I think an outside observer would have trouble seeing that I’m swaying at all. I’ve come a long way.

[Read: The trouble with anorexia on film]

My relationship with food has evolved slowly and jerkily over the years, but it is nothing like it once was. I don’t mean that I have a great diet per se; I don’t really know. Detaching from the entire enterprise of monitoring or restricting the food I eat is the only way I managed to break from more extreme patterns of disordered eating. My progress crystallized for me a couple of years ago when, while rummaging through my pantry, I found a forgotten packet of shortbread I’d received in a care package a few months prior. That sort of nonchalance about food—the ability to forget about it—represents a triumph that a younger, sicker version of myself could not have anticipated.

My relationship with my body is a little more complicated. I wouldn’t say that I’ve learned to love it so much as I’ve trained myself not to think about it. Instead of arguing with the voice of negativity that inevitably pipes up any time I linger a little too long at the mirror, I simply direct my attention elsewhere. I dress my body in ways that help me forget about how it appears to other people. I avoid looking at it too often or too closely. So I worried about what any child—and in particular any daughter—I brought into this world would look like, certain that my unresolved antipathy toward my own body would find a new target, and incite in her the sort of bodily shame I’ve spent the better portion of my life working to overcome.

I didn’t exactly think that I would give my children my anorexia. That’s not really how it works. As with other psychiatric conditions, people who develop anorexia tend to have a genetic predisposition that can be stoked by their environment. Parents can certainly shape a child’s attitude toward food and body image—how they talk about their body, whether they’ll consider a diet. They can influence an eating disorder, but it’s not quite right to say they can cause one, Michael Enenbach, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Child Mind Institute who worked on the inpatient eating-disorder unit for adolescents at UCLA for 12 years, told me.

It would be more accurate to say I worried that my children could become collateral damage in my own eating disorder. There, my concerns weren’t entirely unwarranted. But the impact of a parent’s eating disorder on their child is not straightforward, Stephanie Zerwas, a psychologist and the former clinical director of the University of North Carolina’s Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders, told me. For moms who have had an eating disorder, pregnancy can be extremely challenging. And having an active eating disorder during pregnancy does seem to pose risks to the child’s health and development. Even after birth, it can make the job of parenting much harder. “It really does take control of your life,” Enenbach said. But parenthood isn’t always triggering for someone with a history of an eating disorder: In fact, sometimes, parents find their children’s uncomplicated relationship with food inspiring, Zerwas said. And having experience with eating disorders makes one well suited to spot red flags in their kids. “They’re able to pick up on those early signs and signals and intervene way earlier,” Zerwas said. In other words, it can play out in many different ways.

[Read: Nutrition research forgot about dads]

Still, the possibility of my relationship with my child becoming part of the enormous social apparatus of physical scrutiny that makes our culture such fertile ground for disordered eating was more than I could bear. I thought maybe it would be best for someone like me not to have a daughter at all. So when I found out I was pregnant for the first time, I hoped for a boy.

Months later, I gave birth to a healthy baby girl. It didn’t take long for panic to set in: I bristled at the casual doting remarks—“those thighs!”—people made about her tiny body. I still worry that my sensitivity to such comments may inadvertently assign them more value than they are due. I fear I won’t be able to stop her from internalizing harmful ideas about the way she looks. And the truth is, I don’t think it’s possible for me to know with any certainty how my history of anorexia is or is not affecting my daughter. I will leave it to her to render that verdict. But the idea that she—and then her younger sister—could become an object of my repulsion as I once feared now seems laughable. And that’s remarkable because, with each passing day, the little girl I’ve fallen in love with only looks more like me.

It didn’t start out that way. When she first arrived, I remember feeling a kind of relief when I couldn’t make out anything of myself in her little figure. But that soon changed. A week or two after she was born, as I set her on a changing table and removed her diaper, I noticed that the remains of her umbilical cord had fallen out. I didn’t think belly buttons were the sort of thing that could be passed from mother to daughter, yet there it was, my strangely symmetrical belly button, which looks like the top view of a pumpkin, staring up at me.

The unsettling recognition I felt standing at that changing table became a feature of my life as her mother. To anyone else, I imagine she looked like any other pudgy toddler awkwardly growing into her body. But I could see—and a glance at old family videos and photos confirmed—that her body was organizing itself in much the same way mine had. Limbs tilted and interlocked at the same angles; flesh and muscle settled in the same pockets and proportions. The resemblance has grown more striking with time. It’s disorienting, heartbreaking in a way, to see the body you spent so long trying to obliterate emerge in another human and to discover, after all, so much beauty in it. She’s still only in primary school, but even now there is no angle that permits me to escape my reflection. And there is no angle that escapes my love.

Zerwas wasn’t surprised to hear any of this. In her clinical work, she encourages people struggling with bodily shame to “imagine their body in a place of compassion” as a means of shifting their perspective—to see themselves in their entirety, as more than a mere collection of body parts. Parenting may tap into a “wellspring” of such compassion, she said.

It’s difficult to speak about parenthood in universals, but there is something to motherly love, I think. It has a way of taking over too. It has a reputation for blinding those overcome by it, obscuring obvious flaws and rendering even the most frustrating idiosyncrasies endearing. But maybe that’s all wrong. Maybe it allows you to see a person more clearly. I am grateful to my daughter for allowing me to see myself through the eyes of a mother. In his book The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis wrote that unlike the bond between lovers or friends, who often feel that they were made for each other, the love of a parent for a child is of a sort that can reconcile even the least compatible people. A mother and a daughter; a mother and herself.

This article previously identified Stephanie Zerwas as the director of UNC’s Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders; in fact she is the center's former director.

The Catch-22 for Working Parents

2023-03-27T11:48:04-04:00

In the midst of the pandemic, hundreds of dollars began to appear each month in the bank accounts of American parents. The deposits were an expansion of the child tax credit, meant to help families cope with the pressures of lockdown, and recipients no longer needed to earn a minimum income to be eligible. Unlike before, unemployed parents could benefit too. Reaching many of the families left out by other cash-aid programs, the expanded child tax credit lifted millions of kids out of poverty, reducing food insecurity and anxiety among low-income parents along the way. But amid concerns from politicians and pundits that the credit would discourage parents from working outside the home, Congress allowed it to expire at the end of 2021. The decision reflected a position toward needy families that has dominated policy making for decades: The government doesn’t just give money away. If parents want help, they’re going to have to work for it.

[Read: The pandemic exposed the inequality of American motherhood]

It wasn’t always this way. At the beginning of the previous century, the U.S. had the exact opposite stance—it insisted that mothers stay home with their children. In the early 1900s, most states created so-called mothers’ pensions, which provided cash payments to mothers without a breadwinning husband. In addition to upholding various character requirements, recipients were typically forbidden from working for pay. In 1935, these pensions morphed into Aid to Dependent Children (later Aid to Families With Dependent Children), a national program similarly designed to allow single mothers (and later, poor parents more generally) to stay home.

The shift to our current philosophy began during the 1960s, when the program was altered to encourage recipients to seek employment, though parents caring for kids younger than 6 were exempt. This exception disappeared in the ’90s, when the Clinton administration severely restrained cash aid to unemployed parents and increased the earned income tax credit, which ties cash assistance to parents directly to income. Today, the bulk of financial support available to parents in America is funneled through a collection of tax credits—up to a certain point, the more you earn, the more you get. The paid labor that was once a disqualification from aid is now a prerequisite for it.

While no less overbearing than modern-day policies, the concept of the mothers’ pension made some sense, because it recognized that someone caring for a child already has a job. A lot has to go right for parents—particularly single parents, who still make up the majority of earned income tax credit recipients—to balance employment and child-rearing. Assuming the job can’t be done with a child in tow or from home at the parent’s convenience, a working parent needs child care. She also needs a schedule with enough predictability to arrange that child care. Finally, she needs the ability to take time off or adjust her schedule as circumstances require—to recover from childbirth, for example, or to care for a sick kid. Many American jobs lack these accommodations, a problem that has real consequences for American parents and children, but which policy makers have largely failed to address. This is a cruel contradiction of American family policy: It’s designed to reward working parents but does very little to enable parents to work—or workers to parent.

Balancing work and child-rearing is difficult for U.S. parents across the income spectrum, but the conditions are particularly egregious among low-wage workers. The cost of market-rate child care, which in 2021 averaged more than $1,000 a month, is prohibitive for poor parents, and subsidized child care is hard to come by. The main program that provides subsidies for child care—the Child Care and Development Fund—serves less than a quarter of eligible families. Some parents who manage to obtain a subsidy struggle to keep it, because of the challenges of navigating the bureaucracy. Others find themselves suddenly ineligible after a small raise or a temporary bump in hours places them above the income threshold, Alejandra Ros Pilarz, who studies working families with low incomes at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. What’s more, finding a child-care provider who is willing to accept a subsidy is difficult, because the program’s reimbursements are often too low to cover the costs of providing care. More options are available once kids turn 3, such as Head Start and public pre-K in some states, but those programs likewise provide care to a fraction of the families they are intended to serve. And there is precious little in the way of subsidized after-school or summer care for older kids.

But the lack of child care is only part of the problem. Parents in huge swaths of the labor market lack flexible, predictable schedules. Employees in the food-service and retail industries, which account for nearly one in five American jobs and the majority of near-minimum-wage positions, tend to work highly volatile hours—30 hours one week, 10 the next, a night shift today, a morning shift tomorrow—with very little notice. As of 2021, more than 60 percent of service-industry workers get their schedule less than two weeks in advance; one quarter get it just three days ahead of time. “And then, once the schedule is published, it’s subject to change,” Daniel Schneider, a social-policy professor at Harvard and a co-director of the Shift Project, an organization that tracks job quality and scheduling practices in the service industry, told me. A fifth of workers report having to be on call, waiting at the ready to come into work but unpaid if they aren’t needed. Nearly three in four are required to keep their schedule open for work at all times.

The picture doesn’t look much better when it comes to leave. Many low-wage workers don’t meet the work-history requirements to qualify for the unpaid leave protected by the federal Family and Medical Leave Act—they may not have accumulated sufficient hours or stayed with the same employer long enough. The few existing state-run paid-parental-leave programs exclude a lot of low-wage workers for the same reason. According to research done by the Shift Project, only about half of service workers surveyed have any paid sick leave. Those who have it don’t get much—maybe not even enough to make it through flu season with a toddler—and many don’t feel they can actually use what little they get. “A lot of these work sites are chronically understaffed,” Kristen Harknett, a professor at UC San Francisco and a co-director at the Shift Project, told me. “So there can be pressure to come in, even when you’re sick.”

The erratic nature of much low-wage work severely limits a parent’s child-care options. For many, center-based child care is practically unusable, not only because many service jobs involve weekend and evening hours, but also because just-in-time, on-call work requires just-in-time, on-call child care, which is functionally impossible for formal child-care settings to provide. But even informal care is extremely difficult to arrange without predictability. Harknett and her colleagues investigated how parents with unpredictable schedules manage child care and found that, in the best-case scenario, a grandparent or other loved one functioned as a just-in-time carer. (I will stop to point out the irony here: Our insistence on pushing single parents into the labor force often necessitates that another family member remain out of it.) But “that requires that somebody be at your beck and call to provide child care for you whenever it’s needed,” Harknett said. “That’s pretty uncommon.” More often, parents relied on a patchwork of family members, friends, neighbors, and babysitters.

Piecing together informal care on the fly is a time-consuming process, and these last-minute requests can strain parents’ relationships, Harknett told me. It’s also risky. When none of the usual standbys was around, Harknett found, parents who couldn’t afford to lose their job sometimes left a small child in the care of a young sibling, or entirely unsupervised. The lack of sick leave presents vulnerable parents with a similar set of terrible options: risk losing their job to care for a sick child, send the sick child to school or day care, or leave the sick child unattended.

[Read: Why did we ever send sick kids to school?]

Parents who simply cannot work under these conditions are largely locked out of America’s cash-aid programs. But even for many of those who manage to hold a job, the cost and chaos of doing so can undercut the benefit of the aid they get. Children exposed to varied and unstable care arrangements have more behavioral problems than children with regular care arrangements; schedule instability negatively affects not only kids’ behavior, but also their sleep, school attendance, and health. None of this should come as a surprise. “Children thrive from stable and predictable routines,” Harknett said. This is the consequence of making caregivers work for aid in a labor market that is hostile to them: It pits children’s different needs against one another, forcing parents to choose between hunger and neglect, between the hardship of going without a paycheck and the strain of keeping it.

The expanded child tax credit offered parents a meaningful counterweight to these pressures when, during the crisis of the pandemic, it became politically viable to give parents money for the job of parenting. And, despite the concerns about parents dropping out of the workforce, these cash payments didn’t seem to budge employment much at all. But as the threat of the virus has waned, so too has the momentum behind more-supportive policies for parents. President Joe Biden reintroduced these cash payments in his latest budget proposal, but few expect the item to survive negotiations.

If the U.S. is unwilling to help unemployed parents, then it should make a far greater effort to ensure that parenting and work are compatible. Expanding funding for the child-care-subsidy program to meet the needs of eligible families would be a great place to start, Pilarz told me. That would require increasing reimbursement rates for providers, including informal providers whom families call on for nights and weekends. Building up access to Head Start and public pre-K programs would help too. But no amount of child care will make up for the chaotic conditions under which low-income Americans are expected to work. “We have to look for solutions both on the child-care side and on the employment side,” Pilarz said.

That could mean passing truly universal paid-family-leave laws, as well as laws for paid sick leave. It might also mean a national policy requiring employers to give workers at least two weeks’ notice of work schedules. Research suggests that these so-called fair-workweek laws, already on the books in a handful of cities and two states, make life meaningfully easier for working parents. But a more thorough transformation of the service industry would likely be required to address the thornier problem of understaffing, which creates strong pressure to go to work at all costs, Harknett told me. Ideally, employers would give workers some control over their schedule, allowing them to safeguard certain hours of the day.

America wants to have it both ways: insisting that poor single parents work while shrugging its shoulders about the conditions that can prevent them from doing so. The result is a system both careless and cruel. If we want needy parents to work, then we ought to take steps to ensure that it’s possible for them to both work and parent well. If we’re unwilling to take those steps, then we should find a way to support families regardless of whether they work or not. And if we won’t do either, then we must admit that we aren’t really interested in helping parents at all.

Judging Parents Online Is a National Sport

2023-02-16T07:00:00-05:00

To be a parent on the internet is to be constantly accused of false advertising. We make parenting sound “so freaking horrible,” “messy, tedious, nightmarishly life-destroying,” like it will “change everything, mostly for the worse.” Or is it that we make it look “so easy,” “aesthetically-pleasing” and “effortlessly beautiful,” “miles from what motherhood looks like for many of us”?

People can’t seem to agree on whether it’s our soul-sucking complaints or our phony cheer that dominates the discourse. By some accounts, current discussions about the difficulties of motherhood are a pushback against a time when it was idealized. Others say the “mommy internet” used to be a place where moms could be “raw and authentic”; only recently has it become overrun with “staged, curated photos that don’t show the messier part of life.” Either way, it’s irresponsible. What real-life mother could possibly measure up to a “vision of motherly perfection”? Who would choose to have children in an atmosphere that insists child-rearing is so bleak?

I don’t find either argument terribly convincing. Whether you think the internet is overwhelmingly positive or overwhelmingly negative about parenting probably says more about the kinds of content you notice than what’s actually out there. It’s the digital equivalent of buying a Honda Civic and then suddenly seeing them everywhere. If you are seriously considering having kids, the internet seems awash with horror stories about exhaustion and rogue bodily fluids. When you feel overwhelmed by parenting, logging on is all doting odes to the beauty of parenthood. Both veins of critique make a similar allegation: that there is something off about the way parenting is represented online, and it’s causing people distress in real life.

These critics don’t typically accuse parents of lying, exactly, but of omission. It’s okay to share the highs or the lows, but we really ought to show the other side. The mountains of dirty dishes should be balanced out by the baby giggles and kiss-blowing, and vice versa. It’s a plea for authenticity. If parents would just commit to offering more realistic portraits of the parenting experience online, then we wouldn’t feel so bad about ourselves while scrolling past them.

[Read: Parents are not okay]

I can’t figure out exactly how people would prefer me to feel about my kids. To share either joy or struggle is to invite not only judgment, but accusations that I’m somehow making it harder for everyone else to parent. As best as I can tell, parents ought to convey that they are happy but not happier than anyone else, and also miserable, but not so miserable that they seem ungrateful for their bundles of joy. Obviously I agree that lying isn’t great, and I also think there is a real temptation to universalize one’s parenting experience that ought to be kept in check. But parents aren’t responsible for providing an authentic account of their lives to strangers online, and even if they did, that wouldn’t stop the endless cycle of content insisting that parents are Being Online wrong. Parenthood is daunting and deeply personal; it naturally stirs up people’s insecurities. We can’t post our way out of that.

We cannot possibly close the gap between the reality of parenting and what it looks like online. We are all sharing fragments of our lives that barely begin to illustrate what living it is actually like. And parents share for a variety of reasons. Some harvest the #parentlife for laughs, others for beauty. Some are looking for commiseration or understanding. For me, social media is a kind of scrapbook that I maintain to keep in loose contact with people I will probably never call. On Instagram, I share articles I’ve written and the occasional picture of my kids. On Twitter, you’ll find snippets of funny conversations with my children, or the occasional musing about the strangeness of raising a human. If any of my followers on either platform are frustrated that I don’t seem to be providing a convincing performance of motherhood, then my suggestion is to stop looking for it there. You would have as much luck trying to suss out the reality of motherhood from a holiday card. You’ll find my more in-depth thoughts on parenting in my writing, but even taken all together, everything I’ve shared publicly about my life as a parent leaves a whole lot out.

In the push for authenticity online, we’ve begun to pathologize sensible levels of discretion. No one would fault you for cleaning your countertops before inviting guests into your home, but if you do that before livestreaming to hundreds of thousands of people online, it’s tantamount to lying. Even so-called momfluencers, who make money talking about motherhood online, don’t get a fair shake on this point. I have no doubt that many are vouching for products they don’t actually use. Some of them are pushing misinformation or troubling political views. But a lot of the complaints levied against momfluencers are about pretty reasonable stuff. Their houses are always clean; their kids are always sweet and well behaved in their videos. They tend to talk about the hard parts of their life after those issues have been resolved. None of that strikes me as particularly damning. Showing everyone your dirty laundry is not a precondition for selling leggings to postpartum moms.

Some evidence certainly suggests that engaging with motherhood content on social media can have a range of harmful effects. (Even in research papers, it seems, what mothers post frequently gets more scrutiny than what fathers do). But the relationship isn’t as straightforward as you might expect. One study found that for mothers prone to social comparison, pretty much any kind of Instagram parenting content made them feel bad. The same study showed that posts can have positive and negative effects simultaneously. For instance, mothers found profiles sharing practical information about parenting and child development the most helpful, but those accounts also made mothers feel bad about their own parenting competence more reliably than the momfluencers did. The same online content can also affect different people in different ways. Individuals with a tendency to compare themselves to others feel worse after viewing positive content; those without that proclivity feel better. For mothers, more regular engagement with momfluencers on Instagram is linked to a lower sense of self-efficacy; for women who are pregnant for the first time, it’s associated with higher self-efficacy. In other words, how a particular post makes you feel has a lot to do with you.

[Read: Reporting on parenthood has made me nervous about having kids]

No amount of transparency and authenticity can spare us the pitfalls of comparison, because those don’t come from social media—they come from the variety and uncertainty of the human experience. We are all different people, raising different kids, under different circumstances and on different timelines. What is comforting to one person is terrifying to another, and enraging to someone else.

Take my youngest daughter, Jane. To call her a “good sleeper” would be an understatement. We never had to do any kind of sleep training for her. Crib, bassinet, swaddle, no swaddle—it did not matter; that kid would sleep anywhere, for hours at a time. Our bedtime routine consisted of plopping her into her crib and walking away. If you are expecting your first child, that information may be soothing, a welcome invitation to hope that perhaps parent life won’t be so hard after all. If you currently have a baby who sleeps in 45-minute intervals, only after an hour of desperate coaxing, it is likely enraging. Now consider the fact that when I left my job after Jane was born, I fell into a depression that took me years, and many failed attempts, to crawl out of. At my lowest point, I became convinced that I was simply not cut out for parenthood, and if someone had offered me a way to undo it, I would have been tempted to accept. For a nervous prospective parent, that information may be petrifying; for a stay-at-home mom who really enjoys her life and is sick of people pitying her for it, that information may be frustrating. But to the mother of two under three whom I shared this with when she recently confessed similar feelings to me, that knowledge offered a bit of solace during a difficult time.

Sharing one’s parenting experiences in a way that is useful is actually quite challenging. In offline life, people are constantly screwing this up too. I still don’t understand why when, near the end of each of my pregnancies, I mentioned that I wasn’t sleeping a wink, people so often replied with some version of “Well, get as much sleep as you can now, because you won’t sleep when the baby comes.” How is that information helpful to me, a person who just stated that she is unable to sleep? And anyway, you can’t stock up on sleep like frozen lasagna. But the uselessness of their advice doesn’t make what they were trying to tell me any less true. Realistically—authentically—new parents often get very little sleep!

This sort of mismatch between information and the person receiving it is a hazard of publishing anything in a public forum. There is no way for people to share their child-raising experiences online in a way that ensures all prospective parents are duly warned but not discouraged, that every struggling or thriving parent finds their life reflected back at them, that everyone’s decisions are validated and fears allayed. As long as we’re calling out unrealistic expectations of American parenthood, holding every tweet and TikTok to such a standard is certainly one of them.

The Bizarre Relationship of a ‘Work Wife’ and a ‘Work Husband’

2023-02-07T14:46:00-05:00

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It started out as a fairly typical office friendship: You ate lunch together and joked around during breaks. Maybe you bonded over a shared affinity for escape rooms (or board games or birding or some other slightly weird hobby). Over time, you became fluent in the nuances of each other’s workplace beefs. By now, you vent to each other so regularly that the routine frustrations of professional life have spawned a carousel of inside jokes that leavens the day-to-day. You chat about your lives outside work too. But a lot of times, you don’t have to talk at all; if you need to be rescued from a conversation with an overbearing co-worker, a pointed glance will do. You aren’t Jim and Pam, because there isn’t anything romantic between you, but you can kind of see why people might suspect there is.

The term for this type of collegial relationship—work wife or work husband—has become a feature of American offices. The meaning can be a bit slippery, but in 2015, the communications researchers M. Chad McBride and Karla Mason Bergen defined a “work spouse” relationship as “a special, platonic friendship with a work colleague characterized by a close emotional bond, high levels of disclosure and support, and mutual trust, honesty, loyalty, and respect.” Other scholars have argued that the connection actually sits somewhere between friendship and romance. Although articulating exactly what makes work spouses unique can be hard, individuals who have them insist that they are singular, Marilyn Whitman, a professor at the University of Alabama’s business school who studies the phenomenon, told me. But the language people use to describe this bond is even trickier to explain than the nature of the relationship: Why would two people who aren’t married or even interested in dating call each other “husband” and “wife”?

[Read: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults]

The term made a little more sense in its original form. The phrase office wife seems to have been coined in the second half of the 19th century, when the former U.K. Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone used it to describe the oneness of mind and uncalculating commitment shared by a minister and his (male) secretary. In later decades, the expression became a means of referring to secretaries more generally—that is, to typically female assistants who handled their boss’s tedious affairs at work as his wife did at home. At times, it gestured toward the potential for romance, as in Faith Baldwin’s 1929 novel The Office Wife, in which a wife, a husband, and a secretary are entangled in a web of infidelity. But eventually, this trope fell out of favor; secretaries distanced themselves from the role of their boss’s caregiver, and the influential feminist scholar Rosabeth Moss Kanter criticized the gendered divisions of labor and power imbalances that work marriages created.

But work spouses didn’t so much disappear as evolve. By the late 1980s, in step with changing attitudes toward marriage, the dynamic had started to morph into something more egalitarian. As David Owen, a former contributing editor at The Atlantic, described in a 1987 essay, the new office marriage did not have to be a hierarchical and questionably romantic relationship between a boss and a secretary; it could be a platonic bond between a male and a female peer. The appeal, to Owen, lay as much in what the other person didn’t know about you as what they did: The two of you could share secrets about your real partners, but because your work wife didn’t know about your habit of leaving dirty dishes in the sink, she wouldn’t nag you about it. It was a cross-sex relationship that benefited from professional boundaries, offering some of the emotional intimacy of marriage without the trouble of sharing a household.

Today, your work spouse doesn’t need to be someone of the opposite gender, though McBride and Bergen found that these relationships still tend to occur with someone of the gender you are attracted to. You don’t have to have a real spouse to have a work spouse, though a lot of work spouses do. The office marriage has shed many of the stereotypes that once defined it, but the term itself has strangely persisted.

The impulse to assign some sort of name to a relationship like this makes sense. Labels such as “sister” and “colleague” give people both inside and outside a bond a framework for understanding it. Less traditional pairs, such as work spouses, “have to work even harder to justify and explain to other people who they are and who they are to each other,” Aimee Miller-Ott, a communication professor at Illinois State University, told me. Familial terms are common labels to choose—they’re universally understood and offer a “handy” set of metaphors, the anthropologist Janet Carsten explains. Usually, however, when people reach for kinship vocabulary to describe nontraditional relationships, they select blood relations, Dwight Read, an emeritus professor of anthropology at UCLA, told me. With the exception of some straight women calling their best friend “wifey,” using husband or wife is virtually unheard of—certainly within cross-sex friendships. None of the researchers I spoke with could think of another example.

[Read: The widespread suspicion of opposite-sex friendships]

This curious usage might simply be an artifact of the romance-novel “office wife” trope, Whitman suggested. But the marital language also makes some intuitive sense. Work marriages involve a type of compatibility, lastingness, and exclusivity that also tends to characterize real marriages. Of course, a lot of these traits are true of good friendships too. But when people hear the word friend, they don’t necessarily imagine this intensity—the word has been diluted in the age of Facebook, referring to any number of loose acquaintances. This is certainly true at work, where chumminess can raise eyebrows and friendliness itself is kept in check for the sake of professionalism. Against this backdrop, real friendship stands out. Add in the age-old misgivings about close ties between men and women, and the extended proximity that working together necessitates, and it’s unsurprising that people in a professional setting might assume that a tight bond is actually a disguise for the beginnings of a romance. Because of this, some avoid using the term work spouse publicly. For others, Miller-Ott suspects that combining the word work with wife or husband may be an expedient, if counterintuitive, way of addressing such suspicions: Yes, we’re very close. No, we’re not dating. Using a phrase that implies monogamy may help explain the relationship by affirming that it is atypical—that these two people have mutually decided to relax the rules of professionalism with each other but not with anyone else.

Employing the term in this way only sort of works, because although wife and husband reliably connote intimacy and singularity, they also imply sex and romance. Indeed, Carsten, the anthropologist, was somewhat amused that spousal language might be used to defuse rumors that two people are dating. One cannot borrow some implications of a word and leave the rest—and people seem to be aware of this. In Miller-Ott’s research, many of the people she spoke with called each other “husband” and “wife” only when they were alone. Others with close work friendships refused to use the label at all, Whitman and Mandeville found, fearing that their real partner might object.

But for some people, the slightly illicit connotations of the work-marriage terminology may be part of its draw. Perhaps that’s one reason so many colleagues who wouldn’t call each other “husband” or “wife” publicly continue to do so privately: Referring to someone by a title that skirts the boundaries of propriety may be a way to bond with them. But ultimately, work spouse breaks down for the very reason it works: It co-opts the exclusivity of a word intended to describe a very different relationship.

The Dilemma of Babies on Airplanes

2022-12-21T07:00:00-05:00

Boarding a crowded plane with a small child feels like entering a game show where each contestant has been given a different set of rules: Everyone walks away feeling cheated. Nonparents feel robbed of the peaceful trip they paid for. Parents feel that they were set up for failure. The ultimate prize—a relaxing trip with no screaming and no strangers shooting you judgy looks—is rarely winnable. In the most heated conflicts, one of the aggrieved parties takes to social media, where the public acts as referee. The matter is almost never resolved.

Why does flying with children generate such conflict? It could simply be that travel is hard, for kids and adults alike, and tends to bring out the worst in both. But I suspect it’s more than that. Sharing airspace with young children seems to challenge not only our patience, but also the entire social order.

At the root of every one of these seemingly small-potatoes skirmishes is a bigger question: What do we owe a stranger’s child? Should we have to listen to them cry and babble? Must we tolerate the sound of their toys and TV shows? Are we obligated to trade our premium window seats with them so they can sit with their parents?

A sensible answer is that you don’t owe anything to other people’s children, or rather, that you owe them nothing more than you owe anyone else. It’s a very American answer, one that follows naturally from the logic of liberalism: Each of us is the master of our own destiny, free to do as we please within the bounds of the law, and to bear the consequences. To have children, then, is to assume the social and financial costs of raising them. Your kids, your problem. In shared public spaces, parents are responsible for making the appropriate arrangements not only to care for their kids, but also to ensure that they aren’t an imposition on others.

The conditions on an airplane are uniquely suited to testing how well this works in practice. There are few institutions that cater to young kids, and air travel certainly isn’t one of them. Thus, as elsewhere in American life, it’s mostly up to parents to try to meet their child’s needs in a space designed for adults. You might assume that airlines would at least ensure that parents can sit next to their own kids, but in many cases, you must pay for the privilege. (To be fair, the Department of Transportation issued a notice earlier this year urging airlines to allow parents to sit with kids 13 and under at no extra charge.) But unlike in other public places, passengers on an airplane cannot leave. Parents and children can’t hide away in playgrounds or libraries. People who don’t like kids can’t avoid them. Enclosed in a flying metal tube, we witness in real time how spectacularly the tenets of individualism collapse when kids crawl into the picture. In the air, we must face the fact that everyone’s kids are everyone’s problem—and witness how strange things get when we pretend otherwise.

The individualistic approach to parenting rests on an assumption that breaks down the moment the flight crew shuts the door: that parents control their child’s behavior. Don’t get me wrong—I have no problem telling my kids “no.” But even strict parenting doesn’t allow you to control your kids like a marionette. You can get very stern with a toddler or confiscate their toys, but you can’t actually force them to stop yelling.

In the nearly six years since I became a parent, I have flown with one or both of my daughters more than 50 times, and I have no more advice for parents than what they will find in the trillion well-intentioned but underwhelming articles already in circulation about how to fly with little kids. Some children seem to handle air travel better than others, but that has as much to do with their temperament as anything their parents are doing (and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise). It gets easier with age and practice, but there is no parenting hack for making your kid act like an adult on an hours-long flight to see Grandma for the holidays.

Many readers will no doubt disagree with me and insist that parents these days are simply too soft. The parents of yesteryear would never have tolerated such behavior. People have been saying as much for a long time. “Why all this fuss about traveling with kids?” a man was quoted as saying in a New York Times feature on traveling with children. “When I was little, kids sat where they were told, kept their feet off the upholstery and that was that. If we wanted amusement we looked out the window.” “Maybe so,” conceded the author, Dorothy Barclay. “But children that thoroughly disciplined are rare in this era.” The year was 1956.

The impossibility of controlling a small child’s behavior doesn’t stop people from trying, which can have some odd effects on parenting. Sometimes, I have found myself performatively reprimanding my kids, lest I be accused of “letting” them misbehave. If you ever hear a parent in the row behind you say something like “That’s quite enough, young lady” or “Time to sit still” to their lap baby, rest assured: You are the intended listener. But most of the time, preventing a child from annoying fellow passengers means doing anything and everything to keep the kid happy. Especially with toddlers, this is an exhausting process that entails using distractions to purchase relative peace in 10-minute increments.

Oftentimes, the pressure to keep a child quiet means relaxing boundaries a parent might otherwise enforce. Screen limits and dietary considerations go out the window. One time, when my eldest was 18 months old and still uninterested in screens, I took a tip from Jim Gaffigan’s book Dad Is Fat and purchased a bag of Dum Dums for the flight, hoping that having a lollipop in her mouth might help keep her entertained and quiet. It worked, sort of—but unfortunately, Dum Dums don’t last very long. She had two before we boarded and several more in the air. Sparing the rest of the plane the wrath of a child who’s been told “no” requires parents to pick their battles. If I always insisted that my daughters not eat the food they drop on the airplane floor, as I probably ought to, my fellow passengers would get an earful about it.

Some people think parents are simply too inconsiderate of their fellow passengers to bother disciplining their children. In fact, in many cases, consideration is at the root of parents’ strangely permissive behavior. Why is that dad letting his kid jump up and down in the seat? Because it’s the only way to stop her from kicking the seat in front of her. Why is that mom allowing her kid to listen to Ms. Rachel without headphones? Because the kid won’t tolerate headphones, and she’s betting that passengers prefer Ms. Rachel to the alternative (kicking and climbing and whining and screaming).

You may disagree with how a particular parent handles a particular scenario, but there’s often no way to make everybody happy. Take the time my then–lap baby discovered that if she released the tray table in front of her, it would fall with a delightful thwack that could not have been pleasant for the person sitting in front of us. What does a conscientious parent do in that scenario? I could place my hand over the clasp and physically bar her from fiddling with it, but she’d lose her mind for anywhere from five to 55 minutes if I did. Do I subject everyone on the plane to an extended tantrum in order to spare the gentleman in front of me two hours of thwacking? I’m serious—I really want to know.

The actual needs of the child are all too often absent from this tricky social calculus. But that’s what happens when the job of a parent in a shared public space is principally to ensure that the child isn’t a nuisance. It demands a style of parenting that is at once hypervigilant and overly permissive, where kids are given constant attention but no agency. Ironically, it works against the long-term goal of raising competent, well-behaved kids. Hamstrung by the need to make sure their kids don’t inconvenience anyone else, parents can’t do much parenting at all.

[From the October 1967 issue: Traveling With Children]

I don’t mind letting my parenting slide for a couple of hours in order to keep the peace on an airplane, but I wish I didn’t have to. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t feel socially irresponsible to tell my child not to eat off the floor or that she’s watched enough Peppa Pig for now. But that would require other passengers to accept a little unruly—that is, childlike—behavior rather than see it as a failure of parenting or a violation of the social contract. There is no way to allow kids to be kids and parents to be parents in public without letting them play by a different set of rules.

The tension between the needs of children and the comfort, order, and efficiency of adult life play out everywhere: restaurants, doctor’s offices, grocery stores, malls, workplaces, you name it. Children just don’t fit neatly into the adult world. Not tolerating that essential truth excludes parents and children from public life and forces parents to compromise on their child’s care. You can’t tailor a child’s needs to fit an adult system; you have to tailor the system to suit the child’s needs.

Giving parents the space to care for a helpless child as they guide them toward competence and autonomy means accepting that we will all be a little inconvenienced. It means organizing work in ways that allow parents to meet the unpredictable and inflexible needs of their kids. It means accepting some noise in restaurants, stores, and, yes, planes. It means introducing inefficiency and discomfort into adult life. Everyone is affected in the process. It’s not possible to keep a child’s needs contained within an individual household. Parenting is a prerequisite for the orderly cooperation among free adults that liberalism promises—but it also disrupts it. We pay this price one way or another: A society unwilling to relax its social contract for its smallest members won’t do a great job of raising adults capable of upholding it.

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Should Friends Offer Honesty or Unconditional Support?

2022-12-12T09:52:25-05:00

Lindsey Konchar has known her best friend, Caroline, since Caroline was born. Their mothers have been best friends since the seventh grade, so even though Konchar is two years older than Caroline, and the two attended different schools in their hometown of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, there was no escaping each other. “We were quite literally forced to be friends,” Konchar told me. But even after they moved out of their mothers’ homes, the friendship continued.

Konchar stayed in Minnesota for college, while Caroline attended school in Boston and then moved to New York City, where she started dating someone. (Caroline is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy.) At first, the new relationship seemed marvelous, “all butterflies and roses,” Konchar recalled. But over time, Caroline’s updates on the relationship grew less cheerful, and more vague. To Konchar, a social worker, something seemed off, and a visit to NYC only solidified her concerns that Caroline’s partner wasn’t treating her well. “She wasn’t her happy-go-lucky self,” Konchar recalled. On the final day of her visit, Konchar decided to express her concerns about the relationship. She chose her words carefully, making sure to cite specific examples, use “I” statements, and clarify that she was speaking up only because she was worried about her friend’s safety. But Konchar could tell that Caroline wasn’t having it. “Her walls went up,” Konchar told me. “We didn’t talk for a long time.”

The dilemma that Konchar faced—whether to say something or bite her tongue—gets at a long-running debate about what it means to be a good friend. Is it appropriate to tell a friend when you think they’re making a bad decision? Or is a friend’s role to offer steadfast and unconditional support, and leave the unsolicited advice to parents, spouses, or siblings? Those parties may feel more entitled or obligated to speak up, because their relationships are better defined and more formalized. But it’s difficult to speak about authority or obligation in friendship, which is to some extent defined by what it’s not: Friends are those who choose to be in one another’s lives although they don’t fulfill a specific role. Even between close friends, it can be tricky to pin down exactly what, if anything, two people owe each other.

[Read: The six forces that fuel friendship]

By one view, like that of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the willingness to be “scrupulously truthful” in such moments is the core of friendship. All humans have blind spots; none of us is immune to poor decision making. A true friend, by MacIntyre’s account, is one who cares enough about our welfare to help liberate us from those illusions. “Friendships survive and flourish only if each friend can rely on the other’s truthfulness,” he once said. Another view, by contrast, holds that it is precisely our willingness to keep our mouth shut in the face of a friend’s error that allows any of our friendships to survive. “Almost always, such human relationships rest on the fact that a certain few things are never said, indeed that they are never touched upon; and once these pebbles are set rolling, the friendship follows after, and falls apart,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote.

Social-psychology research underscores the tension between these perspectives. Honesty is something people both expect and appreciate from close friends. Asked what makes for intimacy in a friendship, people say things like “If I’m making a mistake, my friend will let me know” or “If I need advice, my friend will give it,” according to a study conducted by Beverley Fehr, a psychology professor at the University of Winnipeg. But truthfulness isn’t all that people expect from their friends, and it doesn’t always square with friendship’s other duties. The subjects of Fehr’s study also emphasized the importance of statements like “No matter who I am or what I do, my friend will accept me.” People want honesty from their friends, but also unconditional support and validation. “We have strong expectations for friendships, but that doesn’t mean they can’t conflict with one another,” Fehr told me.

And however important people proclaim honesty to be, research suggests that most of us are very reluctant to confront our friends when issues arise. In another study, Fehr and her fellow social psychologist Cheryl Harasymchuk asked participants how they would handle a variety of problems in romantic relationships. “Regardless of the issue, people say, with a romantic partner, you should discuss it, not just let it be,” Fehr said. When asked to consider similar problems in the context of friendship, however, respondents opted for more subdued approaches. These generally fell into one of two camps: loyalty, which involves waiting out the issue and hoping it improves on its own, or what the researchers called neglect. “You just sort of pull away from the situation and let the relationship die a slow death,” Fehr told me. Asked what would happen if a friend addressed a problem in a more direct way, respondents weren’t as confident that it would do much good. It may be true, as MacIntyre insists, that doing right by our friends sometimes means telling them things they don’t want to hear, but Nietzsche is right that most friends won’t.

The prevailing “culture of passivity,” as Harasymchuk called it, that characterizes most friendships makes some sense. Friendship is a voluntary relationship, unbound by blood or law, which makes it easier to dissolve. In fact, because friendship involves no formal agreement, it’s not even necessary to declare the relationship over—you can just subtly back away from it or allow it to “wither on the vine,” as Fehr put it. Friendships aren’t monogamous, Harasymchuk pointed out, so in the event that you aren’t getting what you want from one friend, it’s easy enough to turn to another. Generally, and perhaps foolishly, people regard friendship as somewhat expendable, unworthy of the hassle of a confrontation. And the fact is, Fehr noted, a lot of friendships seem to be able to survive just fine despite their tendency toward passivity. As far as the preservation of the relationship is concerned, the risks of calling a friend out are high; the risks of keeping quiet are low.

When Leah Goldman, a certified professional life coach from Massachusetts, ended a long-term relationship after discovering that her partner had been cheating on her the entire time, she was baffled by how many of her friends admitted to having reservations about her ex. From her perspective, she’d offered plenty of opportunities to raise such concerns—she had often brought up her own apprehensions about the relationship—but, with a lone exception, no one had done so. When she asked her friends why they had never spoken up, she says most of them told her they just didn’t feel like it was their place to do so. The friend who did speak up lived across the country and had never actually met her partner. But after Goldman shared some of her reservations, the friend said Goldman’s partner didn’t sound like a great guy, and that she should probably end it. The conversation left Goldman feeling more conflicted than upset. Goldman thinks the experience has made her more likely to tell someone if she were to have reservations about their partner, but she harbors no ill feelings toward those of her friends who didn’t. “I can understand their point of view,” Goldman told me. “At the end of the day, they were there for me after the breakup, and that’s all that mattered to me.”

Of course, not all friends are so passive. And some manage to survive even bitter confrontations. Long-standing friendships like Konchar and Caroline’s have an advantage in this regard. A strong foundation of mutual trust makes it easier for friends to speak plainly with one another—and trust takes time to build. Fehr explains this in terms of something she calls the “idiosyncrasy credits.” At the start of any relationship, people tend to conform to societal norms. “Basically, we want to show that we’re pretty normal,” Fehr said. “So we behave in pretty routine ways.” But as the relationship strengthens, we earn the ability to deviate from such norms. If we’ve built up enough credit with a friend, we might feel more comfortable spending it by telling them that there’s something off about the way their partner talks to them or that we’re concerned by how much they’re drinking, or by confronting them about any difficult topic.

[Read: The decline of etiquette and the rise of “boundaries”]

And while telling a friend something they don’t want to hear may indeed cause your relationship with them to suffer, it’s possible that your friend will come to appreciate your honesty down the line. After about six months of silence following her trip to New York, Konchar got a call from Caroline. She had broken up with her boyfriend, and admitted that, although she wasn’t ready to hear it at the time, Konchar had been right about him. When I asked how the incident had affected their relationship in the long run, Konchar said that the conflict had been strangely good for them; it drove a wedge between them initially, but ultimately deepened and solidified their bond. There is something of a paradox at play here: Difficult honesty is a privilege of very close friendships, but it is also part of what draws two friends close.

From a practical perspective, it’s hard to make the case for committing to unflinching honesty as MacIntyre says good friends ought to. Nietzsche was correct, in some sense, when he said that withholding our true thoughts from our friends can help preserve our relationships with them. Because friendship comes with no guarantees. It is a gift; nothing is owed, exactly, only offered. To extend honesty, or anything else, to a friend is to run the risk of its rejection. But if it’s friendship of the closest sort that you are after, it’s a risk you’ll have to take.

The Pandemic Exposed the Inequality of American Motherhood

2022-11-28T07:00:00-05:00

In the early days of the pandemic, the outlook for women seemed bleak. Experts predicted that, faced with an uncertain economy in the midst of a public-health crisis, women would have fewer kids, accelerating America’s long-running drop in fertility. For those who already had children, researchers foresaw plunging employment. Schools and day cares were closing. Family members couldn’t come help with child care. It seemed clear that mothers would take on the majority of this additional labor, forcing many to scale back on or opt out of paid work entirely. American family life would be sent back to the 1950s.

Fortunately, these dire predictions never quite materialized. Women did shoulder most child care but, broadly speaking, they weren’t pushed out of the labor market at higher rates than men. Likewise, births did not crater. Instead they rose slightly in 2021. U.S.-born women had about 46,000 more babies than they would have had COVID never hit, according to one recent analysis.

But these broad figures, just like the sweeping prognostications that preceded them, flatten a more complex narrative about what the pandemic was like for women. The virus and its economic fallout affected women in the top tiers of society in very different ways than it did women at the bottom. Those without advanced degrees and high-paying jobs were pressed out of the labor force in far greater numbers, and experienced a slower recovery, than their more privileged counterparts. Similarly, a baby bump among highly educated women overshadowed a baby bust among their peers without a degree. Reducing all of these experiences to a single thread is impossible. There isn’t just one story about women during the pandemic; there are many.

[Read: The great pandemic baby bump]

For college-educated women, the tale is framed by the safeguards of privilege. Like their male peers, they were far less likely to lose their job than Americans without a degree. Though some stopped working in the spring of 2020, the group’s employment levels recovered pretty swiftly, according to a recent paper by Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economics professor. And although having children to care for did drive women out of the labor force, the effect seemed less pronounced among those who’d gone to college, Goldin found. In the spring of 2021, the percentage of highly educated mothers with at least one kid under 5 who were working was actually higher than it had been two years prior. And these women kept having kids. Their birth rate remained steady at the start of the pandemic, before increasing substantially in January of 2021 and jumping about 6 percent relative to their pre-COVID trend by year’s end.

The reasons for this resilience are fairly intuitive. Educated women—and, very likely, their partners—worked from home at higher rates, which not only kept them safer from infection and minimized the chances that they’d lose their job but also allowed them to better juggle care and work. In Goldin’s words, advanced schooling “inoculated” workers from the economic impact of the coronavirus. Thanks to generous government-aid programs and a booming stock market, savings and net wealth improved during the pandemic—in all income groups, but especially among more affluent households. This extra money may help explain the baby boom in the laptop class, Hannes Schwandt, one of the authors of the fertility paper, told me. For them, the coronavirus actually offered a good opportunity to start a family.

The narrative followed a much different arc for low-income women and those who hadn’t gone to college. The COVID-related drops in employment were far steeper and more persistent among those with less education, according to Goldin’s analysis. Mothers without a degree, particularly those with very young kids, had an especially sluggish recovery; they continued to lose jobs in 2021, even as employment exceeded pre-pandemic levels for highly skilled mothers of toddlers. Black women were also hit particularly hard. Other research has found similar disparities. For example, a preliminary version of a new study showed that school closures did push some women out of the labor force, but mostly those working low-paying jobs. And though some couples fell into a more traditional male-breadwinner/female-caretaker pattern in 2020, the share of dual earners remains below its pre-COVID rate only among families in which neither partner has a four-year degree. Fertility was also marked by such inequality. Births among women without a college degree declined during the pandemic and never fully recovered. Fertility among Black women also dipped in early 2021 and never entirely bounced back. For those women, there was actually a COVID baby bust.

Poor and less-educated women were not as well insulated from the pandemic’s blows. They left the labor force in greater numbers because they were much more likely to work in service jobs highly susceptible to layoffs, and more likely to face challenges with child care: Most low-income mothers couldn’t work remotely and care for their kids during the workday, and they had less saved to help them afford the ballooning prices of babysitting or day care, an industry that is still in shambles. Under circumstances like these, it’s not surprising that fewer poor women had kids.

[Read: America’s child-care equilibrium has shattered]

Though the fates of privileged and less-advantaged women are starkly different, neither of these stories is simple. Many women with relatively high incomes and higher education still faced the immense stress of working from home with kids underfoot. And although they did not leave the labor market in droves as expected, their careers may have suffered in less obvious ways. The strains of homeschooling while working even seem to show up in fertility data: The baby boom was driven largely by first births. Among women who already had two or more kids, births fell, though they largely bounced back by the end of 2021. By the same token, though outcomes were worse for poor and less-educated women, they still fell short of the catastrophic predictions of 2020. The fact that the baby bust wasn’t more pronounced among women who hadn’t gone to college may be a testament to the aid the government provided through much of the pandemic. And the slower employment recovery among poor mothers might be partly a result of lower-income women having more choices: The unusually strong labor market for workers without degrees, or the various forms of COVID aid, may have made surviving on one income easier and allowed mothers without promising job opportunities or quality child care to stay at home with their kids for a while.

Of course, these explanations reveal inequality of a more insidious sort: Whether working motherhood can be characterized as a privilege or a necessity, a possibility or a burden, is largely dependent on the kinds of work and child care available to you. Many American mothers want to work; others don’t but have to anyway. COVID conditions may have given some poorer women new flexibility, but these circumstances didn’t give them the kinds of opportunities their well-off peers fought so hard to keep. Ultimately, the only coherent story we have to tell about the impact of the pandemic on women is one we’ve heard before: It largely reflected, and in some ways deepened, the inequality long embedded in American motherhood.