Good Enough Parenting (Legalize It!)

Your stories about law or custom that makes ordinary parenting hard

This Friday, you can tune in for a conversation about miscarriage care I had with Monica Snyder of Secular Pro-Life. We’re both interested in how parents and children can be treated with dignity and compassion during these losses.

This afternoon (Thursday) I’ll be moderating a panel on pro-family housing policy for American Affairs. The panelists will be Michael Lind, Richard Kahlenberg, and Dan Kishi.

Sophomore Alexa Chacon clears on the high jump during the U.S. Air Force Academy's Holiday Open held in the Cadet Field House Dec. 12, 2014 in Colorado Springs, Colo. (Air Force photo/Mike Kaplan)

I asked you to weigh in on what I called “the SROs of parenting.” Single room occupancy (SRO) buildings offered “good enough” housing (private bedrooms, shared anything else) but are illegal in many cities. Raising the quality floor sounds good in theory, but it means many people are priced out entirely.

I asked you for your examples of where “good enough, but not ✨ ideal✨ parenting” is placed out of reach either as a matter of law or custom.

Ann was willing to fess up to a common (but quiet) compromise:

A big compromise in my parenting standards has been using the TV as a babysitter a couple mornings per week so that I can devote more hours to my hourly WFH job on the days I don't have childcare for my younger kids. Finding a way to make money without needing to pay for full-time childcare makes affording four kids much easier than it would be on a single income. My husband reminds me that we both watched hours of TV with family and sitters while our moms worked and turned out okay.

Co-sleeping is also widely practiced and even more strongly officially discouraged.

Several people mentioned wanting bystanders to chill out about e.g. a seven year old running errands or young kids walking around a mall or a hotel lobby. And many of you would enjoy Old Enough! the Japanese show about preschoolers running their first errand.

Kara brought up an anti-SRO problem close to home for me:

This is a delayed comment, but something I've been thinking about since first reading this - in response to this bit: Some cities (cough Washington DC) have made it illegal to employ preschool teachers who don’t have college degrees. That reads as a banning-SROs move to me. But I don’t have finely grained views on e.g. different carer-children ratios. I’m hoping to develop them.

Before staying home with my 3 children, I worked in and around Early Care and Education. I think the intent here is good, but has negative, unintended consequences. Across the field, elevating the early childhood workforce is a goal. Requiring degrees is one way to change public perception about the importance of the role of child care providers. This creates leverage for higher pay and benefits, therefore making childcare a more desirable profession to pursue. One summer, my research responsibility was to wade-through and summarize Illinois' credentialing system for Early Care and Education. The state was trying to create "equivalencies" for people who had been in the field, providing care and education, for several years, with no formal degree, to those who newly entered the field with Bachelor's degrees (becoming more common). Ideally you would provide pathways to people entering this field from different levels of education, rather than make it illegal to employ someone without a college degree. Continuing education and experience count a lot in this field in particular.

Jordan highlighted a few obstacles that make “good enough” parenting hard. Among them:

• Parks without fencing to block kids from going into the street. It’s not unreasonable to have kids going to the playground to play by themselves (although this can get you a CPS call in many places), and older kids can keep an eye on younger ones within reason. But I also think it’s hard if you have kids in a range of ages when the design of a place requires hyper-vigilance to prevent tragedy.

• The household employee limit for tax filing being $2300. Let’s say I wanted to do something common in centuries past - hire a teenager to help me with household projects or simple tasks. I’m not talking a full blown maid. I’m saying like 10 hours a week of chores (dishes, so on). With minimum wage in our area of $16, I can only hire someone for 14 weeks before I have to report them for taxes. Now I have to get a payroll company, file with the EDD, and pay unemployment if I fire them (even with cause). We have basically stripped away a middle tier job option to allow teenagers to learn to work, and that would make child-rearing significantly easier. Given the increase in the cost of living and so on, it makes no sense to me that the limit for reporting to the IRS isn’t higher - say $10k. Call it a paperwork reduction act!

Fences for parks are huge! A park for kids (especially for young kids) should be safe for the kids to get a looooong way from their parents.

My family will be learning how to handle the nanny tax for the first time this year, and I am definitely a little intimidated by Jordan’s second bullet. (I need a payroll company?!)

One of my big focuses at work this fall is regulatory bottlenecks in child care, with a special emphasis on what makes it hard for friends, family, and neighbor care to operate legally and openly. I’m hoping to find some useful targets for reform, though I understand tax-free income will always be a strong inducement to stay in the gray-market.

Jennifer has a nice point on how odd the nanny tax structure is:

The tax one is particularly galling because you could hire any other self-employed contractor, and just pay the bill, the person fills out a schedule C, done. (Using free tax software this is very straightforward for the individual, and also allows a deduction for any legit business expenses, which freelance babysitters may well incur. My 18. y.o. did this last year, nbd.)

Curiously, one of the IRS's tests for whether it's a contractor or an employee is whether the worker or the payor determines how the work gets done. Reality in childcare: The person caring for the child is absolutely winging it every time, with producing far more unexpected scenarios that cannot be micromanaged than, say, a plumber or an electrician deals with (and those trades get their share of surprises, heh). Indeed the one absolute standard for whether someone should be left to care for children is: Can they handle this one their own, without needing instructions if something comes up?

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And I did ask, too, where you made the choice to fall short of an ideal form of parenting for the sake of something you could sustain.

I really appreciated this from Midge:

The ideals it hurts my heart most to fall short of are in basic music education and basic literacy. All of my kids have *ability* to read that meets standards for their age, but none *like* reading. None will do it for pleasure – or even let me read to them very much for pleasure. Because I haven't trained them to. (I'm often too exhausted to put up with their shenanigans during bedtime reading.) My kids see me read plenty – but on a screen, and they don't think of screens as *for* reading. They also see their parents do *some* musical activities, and we joined a church that at least *has* children's choirs that they're joining as their age makes them eligible. But the kind of music literacy that permits music as at least a serious hobby – what my husband and I could take for granted in our own childhoods? Phphphththt!...

I love music, but I’m not very good as a singer. These are the best years to give my kids fluency in pitch, etc, and they can’t learn it from me, because I don’t have enough to hand on to them. We’re also not prioritizing something like Suzuki right now.

We sing at church, we sing a Salve at bedtime, and we watch musical theater with the kids. I hear them make up little songs of their own. But I wish that music literacy instruction were as common as reading literacy.

Life is about compromises and tradeoffs. It’s good to be open about that fact.