I like the toilet seats that include the option for a mini seat for children. I've seen them in many homes and a few public spaces on standard sized toilets. I also dig "soft close" lids.
The thing that often gets me in public bathrooms is the lack of step stools to access normal counter height for hand washing. A very few large, recently constructed bathrooms will include a lower sink, but a step stool is cheap, portable, and can accommodate many. I find it easier to hold a toddler over a standard toilet than I do holding them up at the sink and simultaneously assisting with hand washing, which in my experience is what they need help with longer, after mastering toileting.
Agree! All our local targets have a Step 'n Wash (invented by a mom!) and I was shocked when we went to Disney World and many (!!) bathrooms had zero step stools. This was a place designed explicitly for kids!
Oh, the dreaded boost-and-sustain with a toddler at a public sink, especially when you have to sacrifice one arm's worth of steadiness to activate the motion-sensor faucet, and then the motion-sensor soap, not to mention continuing to use that "free" hand to scrub some suds into the child's wet fingers, while somehow still balancing on one foot because you've raised and bent one knee into a makeshift seat to prop up their little bottom because your child-holding arm is losing its grip... Yes, step-stools and/or low sinks are a huge asset of inclusive design, and so few and far between!
To balance out my toilet comment, I recently felt so seen when I had to bring my 1-yo along to my 4-yo’s rather long & tedious optometrist appointment at a local childrens hospital. Every single exam room (we bounced among multiple) had a bead maze mounted on the wall in front of the chairs where the parent/guardians sit at exact toddler height. It was amazing. The multi-hour appointment was so much less stressful and exhausting than it would have been in a conventional room. I think half of it is just the relief that comes from a place designed for children. It’s a way in which good design silently announces that you, as a parent, don’t have to handle everything alone. Truly a balm when so many public spaces are designed to the exclusion of children (and often obnoxious inclusion of pets instead).
First, a caveat to my poll answer - my church has a tiny toilet, but only in the nursery, which is not open for every Mass. However, there is an accessible bathroom where the toilet and sink are lower than standard, so while nothing in that space is "tiny" it does facilitate independence.
Physical accommodations - as I think about this, I am surprised to find that our church is the best place I know of, after my daughter's Montessori school, which has an admitted bias towards being physically constructed for children. We have "Mass bags" that are placed on a child-sized rack, so children can get them and return them independently, we have power door openers on all external doors, we have a fully accessible sanctuary (though accessibility to the ambo and altar for those who cannot navigate steps is limited to a ramp at the rear of the sanctuary space), there are at least two designated spaces for wheelchair users within the pews, there are two drinking fountains at different heights, a step stool in the bathroom, our nursery is currently being turned into a sensory room with a live stream of Mass available to watch for anyone who is there, etc.
A book I can recommend on this issue is My Body is Not A Prayer Request by Dr. Amy Kenny. Among other things I learned, churches fought HARD against the passage of ADA, which I found disappointing but unfortunately not surprising.
> Where (at church or elsewhere) have you seen the needs of children incorporated in the physical design of a mixed-age space?
There’s a large coffee shop near us that has a corner with a couch, carpet, and shelf of kids’ toys and books. It’s designed in such a way that any noise and antics are a little bit sheltered from the rest of the space, and yet it’s very visible. It clearly signals, “Everyone is welcome here, including little kids.”
Our local library also has a small toilet in the kids’ section bathrooms, which is excellent.
I haven’t seen it in person, but I know of churches where there’s a soft play area at the back of the sanctuary where little kids and caregivers can “actively listen”.
> Is there a time when putting a money value on “unpaid work” help clarify a decision or get better treatment? How did you run the numbers?
This is more a symptom of my own capitalism-brain than anything else, but it sometimes helps when I feel glum about full-time SAHMing to do a little back-of-the-envelope math about the market “value” of my work. That’s not really how I should measure my worth, and yet...
Your comment about the coffee shop reminded me about our local Chick-fil-A, of all places - when I only had littles, several friends and I would go there regularly on winter mornings because it wasn't crowded then, it had a play structure where our kids could go nuts and still be contained, and the bathroom was very clean and kid friendly.
I also resonate with the "capitalism brain." I love being a SAHM, but I regularly have days where I think "I haven't *done* anything!" That isn't actually true, but I sometimes have to mentally break it down by jobs some people get paid to do for it to actually click.
I would love to see *any* public restroom that has a child-sized toilet. The most frustrating examples being “family” restrooms that don’t even have sinks a child could reach. I’ve yet to encounter a child-sizes potty that we don’t have to haul with us everywhere we go.
I worked for some time as a medicaid caretaker for a baby with Down Syndrome. I adore him and his family, but here is where would push back about paid family caretakers. His mom has been working very hard to change laws around paid caregiving in our area for children with disabilities. These children already all qualify for paid caregivers, but the current laws don’t allow parents to be the paid caregiver. Some families are lucky enough to have grandparents who can fill that role, or, like the family I worked for, a friend (me) who was between jobs. But they don’t pay enough for anything close to the level of consistent care a parent could and does provide. But because of the liability rules, caregivers cannot drive the children or perform any kind of “medical” care... including such things as putting on a CPAP mask or Gtube feeding, both things that are involved in the day-to-day routine care of some children with disabilities (and the boy I cared for). So how was I, who was not allowed to do a good deal of his routine care nor able to drive him to his various doctor’s appointments, supposed to truly care for him? Each time, his mom would still have to be there. That level of involvement basically prohibits her from having most jobs. But lower income families would be even more affected, since hourly workers are even less likely to have the flexibility needed to care for a child with disabilities. When I hear wages for parents, I think about this family and the freedom it would give them to care for their own child, without worrying about how they would put food on the table, a level of care which other caregivers simply cannot provide. Both because of the regulations and also because they just cannot provide the same kind and depth of care as parents. I think this conversation looks different when families have greater or varying needs, but in all cases, I wonder if the problem isn’t so much does paying parents render parenting a efficient and commercial activity, but how can we restructure our society so that parents can really BE parents, regardless of the various needs or circumstances they have. I know this boy’s mother would give anything to be able to stay home and care for her boy forever, but when you have to balance your time with your child and the draining resources, that creates an impossible situation. And for some reason as the law stands now the best solution we have found is to pay people an unsustainable wage to take care of other people’s children with disabilities. While at the same time, rendering that care practically worthless through liability regulation and a complete lack of a vetting process.
I really appreciate you writing up this example. I'm *strongly* pro paying parents who provide caregiving to disabled relatives (and also to paying kin foster parents the same subsidy that would go to strangers).
I don't feel that little potties are necessary because I don't have them at home where my kids actually live. What matters more to me is no automatic anything, especially toilet flushers, and no loud hand dryers. Many normal toddlers find these things frightening.
I don't miss the days of having to remember to drape a piece of toilet paper over the automatic flusher sensor, and keep half an eye on its fluttering edges while the child wiggles their way to completing their business, all to ensure that the whoosh of the auto-flush doesn't come roaring at us anyway, inciting pure terror in the already-nervous child crammed in there inches from my knees with waistbands around their ankles and nowhere to escape to until I juggle my huge mom bag off the hook and perform a geometric theorem's worth of maneuvering to get the door swung open and both of us out of that stall... only to see another adult dripping their hands toward a stainless steel XLERATOR monster mounted by the door...
All this before the dreaded boost-and-sustain at the sink I mentioned upthread, lol. It's a lot of overwhelm for a little one and their attendant grown-up!
Stepstools at the sink are probably the most cost effective, pound for pound addition that make me feel cared for in public restrooms with toddlers. And paper towels should always be available.
A friend of mine bought some step stools and wrote on them "St. John the evangelist parish - do not remove from the ladies room" and took them to her parish and left them in the bathroom. She sent one in to the men's room too. And they're just there. The parish isn't keeping track of its stools. This is a great idea and I think I'm going to do it.
We tried to do this with a potty seat reducer in our sanctuary’s family bathroom but I don’t think it was well labeled because it’s no longer there. Steep stools are another great idea though!
Overall the point about efficiency is well taken, but "efficiency" comes off suffering in this piece, I think - it seems like a dirty word from the Lean Six Sigma realm. Which it definitely can be. But when it comes to any physical/manual task, including those in caregiving, oftentimes mastery means learning how to do the thing more efficiently. There's an efficiency that comes from mastery and one that comes from "labor saving." The second kind isn't even always illegitimate, but the distinction is still helpful, I think. Linger over cooking dinner with your kids, but not necessarily scrubbing the toilet - learn to do it as efficiently as you can.
Now, when it comes to *teaching these tasks to kids* is when things overlap. But you linger over the teaching, not necessarily the doing, so the child can, in turn, gradually become more efficient. I'm reading a book called Child Helpers right now. It's not a "parenting book" but an anthropological monograph. The upshot is that even young toddlers naturally want to be involved in the work they see going on around them. But when time and community are limited, opportunities for letting them "help" when they have no mastery are also limited, and their helping impulse is curbed. Then the parents are shocked when they don't want to do chores once they're older. The benefit of taking time over household tasks with kids present is so they can learn - not because efficiency isn't the goal. The analogy in workplace terms would be that it's less efficient in the long run to cut back on training new employees.
In the early twentieth century, industrial "motion study" and hygiene were applied to household tasks and home design, and this wasn't dehumanizing. (This is where the concept of the "food preparation triangle" came from, if I recall correctly.) Acknowledging the "labor and efficiency" components of housework can be acknowledging its dignity and necessity.
There are tiny toilets in a restroom station at our local zoo, in the area closest to the carousel and playground and petting zoo. Of the five or six stalls, one is the big ADA one, two or three are typical toilets, and two have tiny fixtures (with colorful seats no less! my oldest use to adore getting to use "da bwue one!"). (It occurs to me that I don't know if this is also the case on the men's side, not just the women's... surely, we'd hope??) The small toilet makes it viable for an adult to join a little inside the stall, too, with reasonable ease. At the sinks, half the counter is low-- between grown-up knee-and-hips height-- and thus two of the handwashing stations are reachable by small children without a boost.
Our church has two tiny toilet rooms, opening off a main hallway (i.e. not stashed away with access only through a preschool classroom). I would agree that otherwise, the tiny ones I've noticed have all been associated with defined preschool/childcare spaces.
I am a mostly-SAHM and while I enjoy it, there are definitely seasons where it is wearing. On a whim, I applied for a full time position and quickly got a job offer. It was a decent job with good benefits, but it just didn’t pay enough to substitute the unpaid work I do at home - particularly childcare, as even between my wage and my husband’s salary, we could not have afforded the childcare necessary for me to work full time. It’s not a particularly uplifting calculation, but it was clarifying.
In arguments against financially supporting SAHMs/parent care, I’ve seen the argument that it’s not “efficient.” I don’t think we should be trying to maximize cost efficiency in childcare, but I also wonder if that’s really true for the youngest children. Caring for a baby or toddler in formal childcare does allow for more children per adult than parent care (usually), but it also requires another building, administration, substitutes, cleaners, licensing specialists, duplicate supplies and furniture, etc. Add in paying childcare employees a higher-than-bottom-tier wage, and I wonder if the argument against supporting parent care is really that it’s “not efficient” or if people are uncomfortable acknowledging that caring for one’s own children isn’t just a private choice but has real benefits to wider society.
“I wonder if the argument against supporting parent care is really that it’s “not efficient” or if people are uncomfortable acknowledging that caring for one’s own children isn’t just a private choice but has real benefits to wider society.”
This is a good point. It seems to me this is something few would be willing to acknowledge, since in the “pop feminist” narrative the home is supposed to be a place of oppression for women, rather than a place where women make vital contributions to society.
Yes - it strikes me that there’s a prevailing (usually unspoken) attitude that historically women’s work isn’t “real work,” which raises the question of how we’re valuing the formal care labor force as well. It strikes me that it’s not a far jump from “women’s work in the home is icky/oppressive” to “domestic/care work is icky/oppressive,” which I think is directly reflected in how domestic and care workers are treated in the labor market.
I find this fascinating since “women’s work is icky/oppressive” is the exact opposite of a feminist approach! The devaluing of care work is something feminist literature grapples with extensively, and the pop feminism I come across is about how work in the home should be valued more, not less.
I do think there’s a real fear that staying home can put women at risk - basically everyone I know knows someone who was a SAHP and after a divorce had a rough time figuring out financials. And basically everyone I know also knows a SAHP (sometimes the same person) who had an abusive spouse and a smaller support network because they stayed home.
But recognizing that reality isn’t saying the home is oppressive, just that we probably need thicker safety nets so mothers can leave abusive situations easier and have fewer worries in situations of divorce.
I don’t think it’s universally the case that feminist theories aren’t opposed to stay at home mothers. Simone de Beauvoir said “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” Linda Hirshman opposed child allowances in favor of “proper child care” so that women would “stay in the public world” and called staying home “subordinate heterosexual reproductive behaviors.” This is why I want other feminisms - a feminist theory that devalues caring for my own children and domestic work for my own family is incorrect, unhelpful, and rests on strange mental gymnastics around people who cook, clean, and care in the market.
Sorry for the double post, but I of course only found the other Linda Hirshman quote I was looking for after I finished my first comment: “Worse, I said that the tasks of housekeeping and child rearing were not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings.” I’m not sure what Hirshman thinks of a nanny, daycare worker, or cleaner who spends her day housekeeping and child rearing and goes home to do the same - perhaps that they are not intelligent or educated.
Ugh, that is some reallll garbage. A feminism that blasts women for choosing to stay home is no feminism of mine! That said, Hirshman has done some interesting philosophy when it comes to critiquing what she calls "Choice Feminism". The idea that any choice made by a woman is inherently a feminist one.
I highly recommend checking out Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks. It's a fantastic little book that gets directly at the anti-feminist & the racist implications of care work being devalued. At the same time it really reckons with the way internalized misogyny and patriarchy can show up in our lives, telling us that we have less value or our opinions matter less or we shouldn't let our true selves shine.
Believing that women are equal to men is one part of being a feminist, but consistently *acting* on that belief is a constant struggle in our continuing-to-be-patriarchal society.
I don't think it means demanding efficiency. Our culture speaks the language of capital. Money and power. The demand for "wages for housework" is an attempt to make the invisible, visible, so it is less easy to exploit in secret, in the dark. Sentimentality about women's work has gotten us nowhere. The US so clearly despises the "weakness" of mothers and children, but hides it under loud lip service and sentimental gestures. It's like the clapping for "essential workers" during COVID - you cannot eat, sleep, or take shelter under appreciation. Childrearing costs money and time. Untoward delicacy about this fact does not serve mothers and children.
Something just unsettles me about trying to assign wages to housework and childcare. I see the benefits and goal people are trying to achieve by framing the discussion, but it feels icky in a way I can’t put my finger on.
It feels like just a further extension of the calculation I and so many families do of subtracting the cost of daycare from the lower-earning partner’s salary and trying to decide the financially sound decision from it. “Wages for housework” gives more weight to the SAHP side of the equation, potentially provides extra stability in the case of the loss of the working parent, so it seems like more of a band-aid rather than a paradigm shift solution of culture actually valuing parents staying at home for a time to directly raising their kids in whatever way they find is best for their family’s wellbeing.
Regarding child-accessible spaces, I recently moved to a new town and have been struck by how few restaurants have changing tables in the restrooms. Admittedly these are not places that cater to children, but they are aware enough of children to have high chairs available, but nothing that can serve the purpose to change a diaper without putting a mat down on the floor. Luckily my kids can stand now, I’m not sure what I’d have done when they were younger.
My mom was a SAHM. She homeschooled and cared for my brother with neuroblastoma. When he died we were so broke our relatives covered his funeral. I recently donated to a GoFundMe to buy a single mom a headstone for her stillborn twins. She left an abusive relationship and cannot work and care for her other small children at the same time. Culture shifts don't feed children, shelter them, or in extremis bury them. Misogyny demands delicacy about the real work of birthing and caring. I for one say ENOUGH!
Hear hear! This week Icelandic women struck for the second time (the first time in the 70s led to a massive overhaul of state programs and services as well as regulation that made it one of the most gender equal societies on earth). The slogan was "Do you call this equality?" Because even there, the most equal place, still struggles with gender pay gaps, insufficient support for people who stay home and gender based violence.
I don't think any change will happen until women in this country agree with you, Liz, and really say, ENOUGH!
I’d love to hear more about the paradigm shift you hope for! Directly paying families so that someone can stay home sounds a lot to me like starting to culturally value that work, but I’m definitely missing something!
I’m still working through it. Direct pay definitely would help a lot of families, and it certainly seems odd that you can get a subsidy to pay the daycare lady down the street to watch your kids but not if you watch them. However, I think the cultural shift has to start first, otherwise, I think it’s more than likely that the contempt for this caretaking work will bleed over into how society views any direct pay program, and it will viewed as some welfare program coddling lazy people who should just “get a real job”.
As long as we are trying to make domestic labor within the family measure up to a commercial value system we lose ground because we are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. To say my work as a SAHM “counts” because it has economic value feels like I’ve already missed the point. I could probably continue working and even after daycare expenses be bringing in more money for my family, we could hire cleaners or other help to balance the load of a two working parent household, afford nicer experiences for the kids. To what end? We’ve decided that it is better for the overall health and happiness of our family to have the extra time that having a SAHP brings, and that I love spending as much time as possible with my kids when they are so young and I can keep the house running so my husband can use his free time to be with the kids instead of a million chores. But overall society doesn’t value this choice. It has to be justified as the cheaper option or some other reason.
We need to expand our value system to acknowledge that this work is valuable even if it doesn’t generate a paycheck. That whether or not you are a SAHP, there is a lot of work that goes into raising a child and the more bandwidth and options you can give parents, you’ll have happier families.
Maybe the direct pay option would feel less icky to me if it was framed as money for the child rather than compensation for the parent like a school voucher that can be used however to support a child’s care be it daycare, a house cleaner, or just extra money for bills so a parent can stay home.
I just realized that we kind of already have the beginnings of this in the form of the child tax credit, but it is woefully small and the tax system is so confusing that it is hard to use effectively.
Completely agree. Wages for housework is about giving children a shot of having more present parents at home, something every child deserves. More money, in our society, means those parents can be less stressed about how they'll pay for the next meal, how to pay for an activity a kid is passionate about, how to pay for transportation, and be better able to manage pickups and dropoffs.
I also question the presumptions that some work will always be drudgery and that paying for something inherently leads to a capitalist game of efficiency and exploitation. The fact that we find it acceptable that work can be soul crushing, exploitive, bad for the planet/future generations and worse says a lot about our society, actually!
I'll be adding this book to my to-read list, but in the meantime, two books I read this weekend happen to touch on this topic and are *excellent*: Feminism is for Everybody (bell hooks) & A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Becky Chambers). The latter is eco-futurist science fiction and just an absolute delight. What might a world look like that is fair, and lush, and still very very human?
I remember as a child (in the early 90s!) that my local library had child-size toilets in the kids' section. That was definitely an intentional design, as the library was very large, and had a fantastic (and large!) children's section. It made sense that *of course* they would have child-size toilets and such, but come to think of it...I don't know that I've ever seen that anywhere else outside of daycares or schools.
I don't know that I've advocated for - aside from talking with others about - physical accommodations for a range of bodies, but I remember listening to Beth Silvers on the Pantsuit Politics podcast talk about how if we designed our community spaces for those with physical disabilities, the unintended consequences would benefit everyone. For example, putting in a ramp and a button to open a door not only helps someone in a wheel chair physically get into a space, but it also helps someone who is wheeling a stroller, someone delivering a large package or a full dolly to an office with their hands full, and on and on. I think about that conversation and that idea a lot, actually!
There's a way in which the college admissions process, and in particular the merit scholarship award cycle, offers non-monetary respect to young people who have great depth and breadth in service, leadership, and civic engagement. That is, unpaid labor given toward the public good. Which hits on the mixed-age aspect of your other question, too, since college applicants are in such a "cusp" zone of becoming adults and of situating themselves within their own emerging identity and place in society.
If we allow ourselves a little cynicism, of course, we might question whether all this activity and volunteerism, while amateur and not technically motivated by payment, isn't still commodified in terms of aspirations of access to "good" colleges and elite education and the subsequent benefits that they confer. But I do believe that many young people do earnestly engage with the world around them, receiving and accepting the message that it's important to give back, that chasing top grades in the academic rat race is not an end in itself; and that in general, our society validates and encourages this "service hours" or "well-roundedness" approach. (As well we should, in pursuit of a collaborative, dynamic, inclusive world that allows for interdependence on the path to human flourishing!)
But then, does the script flip at graduation, when gainful employment for good wages (or entrance into yet another good postgraduate program) is offered as the (only) marker of dignity and success? I'm imagining my 18yo self, filling out college applications, certain that her hours and hours of community contributions were lauded and valued by the culture that prompted her to pursue them in the first place (with an additional depth, I hope, anchored by my experiences in the church where service and mission and generosity were taught within the realm of spiritual practice in response to God's goodness, not just generic civic-mindedness). But what of those same high-school students-- earnestly accepting the world's cues to volunteer, intern, serve, lead, create, extend beyond self-- when we become parents wishing to donate our time and gifts to our children? We smart, involved, service-hour-logging college applicants aren't fundamentally different people five, ten, fifteen years later when a baby is on the way; but the respect accorded to group leadership, or service hours, or community improvement, probably still hinges on the benefit going to *public* groups, not *family* groups (or indirectly to the common good via the joy and stability of a family).
I like the toilet seats that include the option for a mini seat for children. I've seen them in many homes and a few public spaces on standard sized toilets. I also dig "soft close" lids.
The thing that often gets me in public bathrooms is the lack of step stools to access normal counter height for hand washing. A very few large, recently constructed bathrooms will include a lower sink, but a step stool is cheap, portable, and can accommodate many. I find it easier to hold a toddler over a standard toilet than I do holding them up at the sink and simultaneously assisting with hand washing, which in my experience is what they need help with longer, after mastering toileting.
Agree! All our local targets have a Step 'n Wash (invented by a mom!) and I was shocked when we went to Disney World and many (!!) bathrooms had zero step stools. This was a place designed explicitly for kids!
Oh, the dreaded boost-and-sustain with a toddler at a public sink, especially when you have to sacrifice one arm's worth of steadiness to activate the motion-sensor faucet, and then the motion-sensor soap, not to mention continuing to use that "free" hand to scrub some suds into the child's wet fingers, while somehow still balancing on one foot because you've raised and bent one knee into a makeshift seat to prop up their little bottom because your child-holding arm is losing its grip... Yes, step-stools and/or low sinks are a huge asset of inclusive design, and so few and far between!
To balance out my toilet comment, I recently felt so seen when I had to bring my 1-yo along to my 4-yo’s rather long & tedious optometrist appointment at a local childrens hospital. Every single exam room (we bounced among multiple) had a bead maze mounted on the wall in front of the chairs where the parent/guardians sit at exact toddler height. It was amazing. The multi-hour appointment was so much less stressful and exhausting than it would have been in a conventional room. I think half of it is just the relief that comes from a place designed for children. It’s a way in which good design silently announces that you, as a parent, don’t have to handle everything alone. Truly a balm when so many public spaces are designed to the exclusion of children (and often obnoxious inclusion of pets instead).
First, a caveat to my poll answer - my church has a tiny toilet, but only in the nursery, which is not open for every Mass. However, there is an accessible bathroom where the toilet and sink are lower than standard, so while nothing in that space is "tiny" it does facilitate independence.
Physical accommodations - as I think about this, I am surprised to find that our church is the best place I know of, after my daughter's Montessori school, which has an admitted bias towards being physically constructed for children. We have "Mass bags" that are placed on a child-sized rack, so children can get them and return them independently, we have power door openers on all external doors, we have a fully accessible sanctuary (though accessibility to the ambo and altar for those who cannot navigate steps is limited to a ramp at the rear of the sanctuary space), there are at least two designated spaces for wheelchair users within the pews, there are two drinking fountains at different heights, a step stool in the bathroom, our nursery is currently being turned into a sensory room with a live stream of Mass available to watch for anyone who is there, etc.
A book I can recommend on this issue is My Body is Not A Prayer Request by Dr. Amy Kenny. Among other things I learned, churches fought HARD against the passage of ADA, which I found disappointing but unfortunately not surprising.
> Where (at church or elsewhere) have you seen the needs of children incorporated in the physical design of a mixed-age space?
There’s a large coffee shop near us that has a corner with a couch, carpet, and shelf of kids’ toys and books. It’s designed in such a way that any noise and antics are a little bit sheltered from the rest of the space, and yet it’s very visible. It clearly signals, “Everyone is welcome here, including little kids.”
Our local library also has a small toilet in the kids’ section bathrooms, which is excellent.
I haven’t seen it in person, but I know of churches where there’s a soft play area at the back of the sanctuary where little kids and caregivers can “actively listen”.
> Is there a time when putting a money value on “unpaid work” help clarify a decision or get better treatment? How did you run the numbers?
This is more a symptom of my own capitalism-brain than anything else, but it sometimes helps when I feel glum about full-time SAHMing to do a little back-of-the-envelope math about the market “value” of my work. That’s not really how I should measure my worth, and yet...
Your comment about the coffee shop reminded me about our local Chick-fil-A, of all places - when I only had littles, several friends and I would go there regularly on winter mornings because it wasn't crowded then, it had a play structure where our kids could go nuts and still be contained, and the bathroom was very clean and kid friendly.
I also resonate with the "capitalism brain." I love being a SAHM, but I regularly have days where I think "I haven't *done* anything!" That isn't actually true, but I sometimes have to mentally break it down by jobs some people get paid to do for it to actually click.
I would love to see *any* public restroom that has a child-sized toilet. The most frustrating examples being “family” restrooms that don’t even have sinks a child could reach. I’ve yet to encounter a child-sizes potty that we don’t have to haul with us everywhere we go.
I worked for some time as a medicaid caretaker for a baby with Down Syndrome. I adore him and his family, but here is where would push back about paid family caretakers. His mom has been working very hard to change laws around paid caregiving in our area for children with disabilities. These children already all qualify for paid caregivers, but the current laws don’t allow parents to be the paid caregiver. Some families are lucky enough to have grandparents who can fill that role, or, like the family I worked for, a friend (me) who was between jobs. But they don’t pay enough for anything close to the level of consistent care a parent could and does provide. But because of the liability rules, caregivers cannot drive the children or perform any kind of “medical” care... including such things as putting on a CPAP mask or Gtube feeding, both things that are involved in the day-to-day routine care of some children with disabilities (and the boy I cared for). So how was I, who was not allowed to do a good deal of his routine care nor able to drive him to his various doctor’s appointments, supposed to truly care for him? Each time, his mom would still have to be there. That level of involvement basically prohibits her from having most jobs. But lower income families would be even more affected, since hourly workers are even less likely to have the flexibility needed to care for a child with disabilities. When I hear wages for parents, I think about this family and the freedom it would give them to care for their own child, without worrying about how they would put food on the table, a level of care which other caregivers simply cannot provide. Both because of the regulations and also because they just cannot provide the same kind and depth of care as parents. I think this conversation looks different when families have greater or varying needs, but in all cases, I wonder if the problem isn’t so much does paying parents render parenting a efficient and commercial activity, but how can we restructure our society so that parents can really BE parents, regardless of the various needs or circumstances they have. I know this boy’s mother would give anything to be able to stay home and care for her boy forever, but when you have to balance your time with your child and the draining resources, that creates an impossible situation. And for some reason as the law stands now the best solution we have found is to pay people an unsustainable wage to take care of other people’s children with disabilities. While at the same time, rendering that care practically worthless through liability regulation and a complete lack of a vetting process.
I really appreciate you writing up this example. I'm *strongly* pro paying parents who provide caregiving to disabled relatives (and also to paying kin foster parents the same subsidy that would go to strangers).
I don't feel that little potties are necessary because I don't have them at home where my kids actually live. What matters more to me is no automatic anything, especially toilet flushers, and no loud hand dryers. Many normal toddlers find these things frightening.
I don't miss the days of having to remember to drape a piece of toilet paper over the automatic flusher sensor, and keep half an eye on its fluttering edges while the child wiggles their way to completing their business, all to ensure that the whoosh of the auto-flush doesn't come roaring at us anyway, inciting pure terror in the already-nervous child crammed in there inches from my knees with waistbands around their ankles and nowhere to escape to until I juggle my huge mom bag off the hook and perform a geometric theorem's worth of maneuvering to get the door swung open and both of us out of that stall... only to see another adult dripping their hands toward a stainless steel XLERATOR monster mounted by the door...
All this before the dreaded boost-and-sustain at the sink I mentioned upthread, lol. It's a lot of overwhelm for a little one and their attendant grown-up!
Stepstools at the sink are probably the most cost effective, pound for pound addition that make me feel cared for in public restrooms with toddlers. And paper towels should always be available.
A friend of mine bought some step stools and wrote on them "St. John the evangelist parish - do not remove from the ladies room" and took them to her parish and left them in the bathroom. She sent one in to the men's room too. And they're just there. The parish isn't keeping track of its stools. This is a great idea and I think I'm going to do it.
We tried to do this with a potty seat reducer in our sanctuary’s family bathroom but I don’t think it was well labeled because it’s no longer there. Steep stools are another great idea though!
My five year old had soap sprayed in his eye from a motion sensor triggered dispenser mounted above his head. Not ok.
Overall the point about efficiency is well taken, but "efficiency" comes off suffering in this piece, I think - it seems like a dirty word from the Lean Six Sigma realm. Which it definitely can be. But when it comes to any physical/manual task, including those in caregiving, oftentimes mastery means learning how to do the thing more efficiently. There's an efficiency that comes from mastery and one that comes from "labor saving." The second kind isn't even always illegitimate, but the distinction is still helpful, I think. Linger over cooking dinner with your kids, but not necessarily scrubbing the toilet - learn to do it as efficiently as you can.
Now, when it comes to *teaching these tasks to kids* is when things overlap. But you linger over the teaching, not necessarily the doing, so the child can, in turn, gradually become more efficient. I'm reading a book called Child Helpers right now. It's not a "parenting book" but an anthropological monograph. The upshot is that even young toddlers naturally want to be involved in the work they see going on around them. But when time and community are limited, opportunities for letting them "help" when they have no mastery are also limited, and their helping impulse is curbed. Then the parents are shocked when they don't want to do chores once they're older. The benefit of taking time over household tasks with kids present is so they can learn - not because efficiency isn't the goal. The analogy in workplace terms would be that it's less efficient in the long run to cut back on training new employees.
In the early twentieth century, industrial "motion study" and hygiene were applied to household tasks and home design, and this wasn't dehumanizing. (This is where the concept of the "food preparation triangle" came from, if I recall correctly.) Acknowledging the "labor and efficiency" components of housework can be acknowledging its dignity and necessity.
There are tiny toilets in a restroom station at our local zoo, in the area closest to the carousel and playground and petting zoo. Of the five or six stalls, one is the big ADA one, two or three are typical toilets, and two have tiny fixtures (with colorful seats no less! my oldest use to adore getting to use "da bwue one!"). (It occurs to me that I don't know if this is also the case on the men's side, not just the women's... surely, we'd hope??) The small toilet makes it viable for an adult to join a little inside the stall, too, with reasonable ease. At the sinks, half the counter is low-- between grown-up knee-and-hips height-- and thus two of the handwashing stations are reachable by small children without a boost.
Our church has two tiny toilet rooms, opening off a main hallway (i.e. not stashed away with access only through a preschool classroom). I would agree that otherwise, the tiny ones I've noticed have all been associated with defined preschool/childcare spaces.
I am a mostly-SAHM and while I enjoy it, there are definitely seasons where it is wearing. On a whim, I applied for a full time position and quickly got a job offer. It was a decent job with good benefits, but it just didn’t pay enough to substitute the unpaid work I do at home - particularly childcare, as even between my wage and my husband’s salary, we could not have afforded the childcare necessary for me to work full time. It’s not a particularly uplifting calculation, but it was clarifying.
In arguments against financially supporting SAHMs/parent care, I’ve seen the argument that it’s not “efficient.” I don’t think we should be trying to maximize cost efficiency in childcare, but I also wonder if that’s really true for the youngest children. Caring for a baby or toddler in formal childcare does allow for more children per adult than parent care (usually), but it also requires another building, administration, substitutes, cleaners, licensing specialists, duplicate supplies and furniture, etc. Add in paying childcare employees a higher-than-bottom-tier wage, and I wonder if the argument against supporting parent care is really that it’s “not efficient” or if people are uncomfortable acknowledging that caring for one’s own children isn’t just a private choice but has real benefits to wider society.
“I wonder if the argument against supporting parent care is really that it’s “not efficient” or if people are uncomfortable acknowledging that caring for one’s own children isn’t just a private choice but has real benefits to wider society.”
This is a good point. It seems to me this is something few would be willing to acknowledge, since in the “pop feminist” narrative the home is supposed to be a place of oppression for women, rather than a place where women make vital contributions to society.
Yes - it strikes me that there’s a prevailing (usually unspoken) attitude that historically women’s work isn’t “real work,” which raises the question of how we’re valuing the formal care labor force as well. It strikes me that it’s not a far jump from “women’s work in the home is icky/oppressive” to “domestic/care work is icky/oppressive,” which I think is directly reflected in how domestic and care workers are treated in the labor market.
I find this fascinating since “women’s work is icky/oppressive” is the exact opposite of a feminist approach! The devaluing of care work is something feminist literature grapples with extensively, and the pop feminism I come across is about how work in the home should be valued more, not less.
I do think there’s a real fear that staying home can put women at risk - basically everyone I know knows someone who was a SAHP and after a divorce had a rough time figuring out financials. And basically everyone I know also knows a SAHP (sometimes the same person) who had an abusive spouse and a smaller support network because they stayed home.
But recognizing that reality isn’t saying the home is oppressive, just that we probably need thicker safety nets so mothers can leave abusive situations easier and have fewer worries in situations of divorce.
I don’t think it’s universally the case that feminist theories aren’t opposed to stay at home mothers. Simone de Beauvoir said “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” Linda Hirshman opposed child allowances in favor of “proper child care” so that women would “stay in the public world” and called staying home “subordinate heterosexual reproductive behaviors.” This is why I want other feminisms - a feminist theory that devalues caring for my own children and domestic work for my own family is incorrect, unhelpful, and rests on strange mental gymnastics around people who cook, clean, and care in the market.
Sorry for the double post, but I of course only found the other Linda Hirshman quote I was looking for after I finished my first comment: “Worse, I said that the tasks of housekeeping and child rearing were not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings.” I’m not sure what Hirshman thinks of a nanny, daycare worker, or cleaner who spends her day housekeeping and child rearing and goes home to do the same - perhaps that they are not intelligent or educated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2006/06/18/unleashing-the-wrath-of-stay-at-home-moms/af9321de-6bf9-49d4-a848-6a3990e3f6ee/
Ugh, that is some reallll garbage. A feminism that blasts women for choosing to stay home is no feminism of mine! That said, Hirshman has done some interesting philosophy when it comes to critiquing what she calls "Choice Feminism". The idea that any choice made by a woman is inherently a feminist one.
I highly recommend checking out Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks. It's a fantastic little book that gets directly at the anti-feminist & the racist implications of care work being devalued. At the same time it really reckons with the way internalized misogyny and patriarchy can show up in our lives, telling us that we have less value or our opinions matter less or we shouldn't let our true selves shine.
Believing that women are equal to men is one part of being a feminist, but consistently *acting* on that belief is a constant struggle in our continuing-to-be-patriarchal society.
I don't think it means demanding efficiency. Our culture speaks the language of capital. Money and power. The demand for "wages for housework" is an attempt to make the invisible, visible, so it is less easy to exploit in secret, in the dark. Sentimentality about women's work has gotten us nowhere. The US so clearly despises the "weakness" of mothers and children, but hides it under loud lip service and sentimental gestures. It's like the clapping for "essential workers" during COVID - you cannot eat, sleep, or take shelter under appreciation. Childrearing costs money and time. Untoward delicacy about this fact does not serve mothers and children.
Something just unsettles me about trying to assign wages to housework and childcare. I see the benefits and goal people are trying to achieve by framing the discussion, but it feels icky in a way I can’t put my finger on.
It feels like just a further extension of the calculation I and so many families do of subtracting the cost of daycare from the lower-earning partner’s salary and trying to decide the financially sound decision from it. “Wages for housework” gives more weight to the SAHP side of the equation, potentially provides extra stability in the case of the loss of the working parent, so it seems like more of a band-aid rather than a paradigm shift solution of culture actually valuing parents staying at home for a time to directly raising their kids in whatever way they find is best for their family’s wellbeing.
Regarding child-accessible spaces, I recently moved to a new town and have been struck by how few restaurants have changing tables in the restrooms. Admittedly these are not places that cater to children, but they are aware enough of children to have high chairs available, but nothing that can serve the purpose to change a diaper without putting a mat down on the floor. Luckily my kids can stand now, I’m not sure what I’d have done when they were younger.
My mom was a SAHM. She homeschooled and cared for my brother with neuroblastoma. When he died we were so broke our relatives covered his funeral. I recently donated to a GoFundMe to buy a single mom a headstone for her stillborn twins. She left an abusive relationship and cannot work and care for her other small children at the same time. Culture shifts don't feed children, shelter them, or in extremis bury them. Misogyny demands delicacy about the real work of birthing and caring. I for one say ENOUGH!
Hear hear! This week Icelandic women struck for the second time (the first time in the 70s led to a massive overhaul of state programs and services as well as regulation that made it one of the most gender equal societies on earth). The slogan was "Do you call this equality?" Because even there, the most equal place, still struggles with gender pay gaps, insufficient support for people who stay home and gender based violence.
I don't think any change will happen until women in this country agree with you, Liz, and really say, ENOUGH!
I’d love to hear more about the paradigm shift you hope for! Directly paying families so that someone can stay home sounds a lot to me like starting to culturally value that work, but I’m definitely missing something!
I’m still working through it. Direct pay definitely would help a lot of families, and it certainly seems odd that you can get a subsidy to pay the daycare lady down the street to watch your kids but not if you watch them. However, I think the cultural shift has to start first, otherwise, I think it’s more than likely that the contempt for this caretaking work will bleed over into how society views any direct pay program, and it will viewed as some welfare program coddling lazy people who should just “get a real job”.
As long as we are trying to make domestic labor within the family measure up to a commercial value system we lose ground because we are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. To say my work as a SAHM “counts” because it has economic value feels like I’ve already missed the point. I could probably continue working and even after daycare expenses be bringing in more money for my family, we could hire cleaners or other help to balance the load of a two working parent household, afford nicer experiences for the kids. To what end? We’ve decided that it is better for the overall health and happiness of our family to have the extra time that having a SAHP brings, and that I love spending as much time as possible with my kids when they are so young and I can keep the house running so my husband can use his free time to be with the kids instead of a million chores. But overall society doesn’t value this choice. It has to be justified as the cheaper option or some other reason.
We need to expand our value system to acknowledge that this work is valuable even if it doesn’t generate a paycheck. That whether or not you are a SAHP, there is a lot of work that goes into raising a child and the more bandwidth and options you can give parents, you’ll have happier families.
Maybe the direct pay option would feel less icky to me if it was framed as money for the child rather than compensation for the parent like a school voucher that can be used however to support a child’s care be it daycare, a house cleaner, or just extra money for bills so a parent can stay home.
I just realized that we kind of already have the beginnings of this in the form of the child tax credit, but it is woefully small and the tax system is so confusing that it is hard to use effectively.
Completely agree. Wages for housework is about giving children a shot of having more present parents at home, something every child deserves. More money, in our society, means those parents can be less stressed about how they'll pay for the next meal, how to pay for an activity a kid is passionate about, how to pay for transportation, and be better able to manage pickups and dropoffs.
I also question the presumptions that some work will always be drudgery and that paying for something inherently leads to a capitalist game of efficiency and exploitation. The fact that we find it acceptable that work can be soul crushing, exploitive, bad for the planet/future generations and worse says a lot about our society, actually!
I'll be adding this book to my to-read list, but in the meantime, two books I read this weekend happen to touch on this topic and are *excellent*: Feminism is for Everybody (bell hooks) & A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Becky Chambers). The latter is eco-futurist science fiction and just an absolute delight. What might a world look like that is fair, and lush, and still very very human?
I remember as a child (in the early 90s!) that my local library had child-size toilets in the kids' section. That was definitely an intentional design, as the library was very large, and had a fantastic (and large!) children's section. It made sense that *of course* they would have child-size toilets and such, but come to think of it...I don't know that I've ever seen that anywhere else outside of daycares or schools.
I don't know that I've advocated for - aside from talking with others about - physical accommodations for a range of bodies, but I remember listening to Beth Silvers on the Pantsuit Politics podcast talk about how if we designed our community spaces for those with physical disabilities, the unintended consequences would benefit everyone. For example, putting in a ramp and a button to open a door not only helps someone in a wheel chair physically get into a space, but it also helps someone who is wheeling a stroller, someone delivering a large package or a full dolly to an office with their hands full, and on and on. I think about that conversation and that idea a lot, actually!
There's a way in which the college admissions process, and in particular the merit scholarship award cycle, offers non-monetary respect to young people who have great depth and breadth in service, leadership, and civic engagement. That is, unpaid labor given toward the public good. Which hits on the mixed-age aspect of your other question, too, since college applicants are in such a "cusp" zone of becoming adults and of situating themselves within their own emerging identity and place in society.
If we allow ourselves a little cynicism, of course, we might question whether all this activity and volunteerism, while amateur and not technically motivated by payment, isn't still commodified in terms of aspirations of access to "good" colleges and elite education and the subsequent benefits that they confer. But I do believe that many young people do earnestly engage with the world around them, receiving and accepting the message that it's important to give back, that chasing top grades in the academic rat race is not an end in itself; and that in general, our society validates and encourages this "service hours" or "well-roundedness" approach. (As well we should, in pursuit of a collaborative, dynamic, inclusive world that allows for interdependence on the path to human flourishing!)
But then, does the script flip at graduation, when gainful employment for good wages (or entrance into yet another good postgraduate program) is offered as the (only) marker of dignity and success? I'm imagining my 18yo self, filling out college applications, certain that her hours and hours of community contributions were lauded and valued by the culture that prompted her to pursue them in the first place (with an additional depth, I hope, anchored by my experiences in the church where service and mission and generosity were taught within the realm of spiritual practice in response to God's goodness, not just generic civic-mindedness). But what of those same high-school students-- earnestly accepting the world's cues to volunteer, intern, serve, lead, create, extend beyond self-- when we become parents wishing to donate our time and gifts to our children? We smart, involved, service-hour-logging college applicants aren't fundamentally different people five, ten, fifteen years later when a baby is on the way; but the respect accorded to group leadership, or service hours, or community improvement, probably still hinges on the benefit going to *public* groups, not *family* groups (or indirectly to the common good via the joy and stability of a family).