Subsidize Parents Who Subsidize You
With a sneak peak from The Dignity of Dependence
One school of thought frames the lack of wages for housework as an injustice within the household. The husband is receiving for free goods and services (meals, laundry, uh… sex) that he would need to pay for if he sought them outside of the house, and therefore the woman is being shortchanged.
I’m pretty skeptical of this case for many reasons:
husbands and wives care for each other (and if they don’t payment isn’t the fix)
doing these things for your spouse is very different than selling them as a commodity (sex most obviously, but all to an extent)
marriages shouldn’t be even (both spouses will have “net receiver” periods and thats ok)
What Stephanie does is lay out a case for government subsidy of the work of raising a family that turns on more recent cultural changes. Quoth she:
For a lot of human history, it really wouldn’t have made a ton of sense for the government to remunerate people for raising kids because although parents bore much of the cost of raising children, they also reaped most of the economic benefits. They were raising their own laborers and carers.
Over time, however, the emergence of labor markets (and later, pensions and the like) effectively socialized most of the economic benefits of raising children. My kids likely won’t be working for me as adults, and even if they did, I’d have to pay them enough to compete with their many other potential employers. Assuming that I maintain a solid relationship with my kids, it’s likely that they will still help me out as I age, but they certainly don’t have to. Modern parents just don’t have much in the way of “dibs” on their adult kids’ labor. So even though parents are still out here doing most of the work of raising laborers, we all pretty much accept that our kids will spend most of their lives working for someone other than us.
In my day job, pushing for baby bonuses and CTC expansion, I sometimes analogize this to the way we try to smooth the way for entrepreneurs and startups. Getting a business off the ground means facing a lot of upfront, localized costs with a wider benefit down the line.
All of us benefit from kids and (useful) businesses being created, so it makes sense to cushion those upfront costs and make it easier for people to take the risk of subcreation.
Taking that leap is particularly hard for aspiring parents—the earlier you have children, the more of your life will overlap with theirs, but the less time you have to save up for the financial shocks that they bring. A program like a baby bonus is redistribution from later in life to earlier in life so that people are freer to flourish.
I’d draw a pretty clear distinction between that form of family subsidy and the wages for housework argument that sees payments to families/women as a way of making care work legible and culturally valued. Here’s a sneak peek from my forthcoming The Dignity of Dependence, specifically the chapter titled “The Limits of Labor Language.”
This section follows an appreciation of Alyssa Rosenberg’s graphical storytelling about the hours she spent breastfeeding and the way nursing sessions speckled the whole day. It isn’t a separate, part-time job. But I found the attempt to quantify the cost less helpful.
[Rosenberg] estimated the cost of breastfeeding and nursing supplies at $1,339 for the first six months. In order to put the cost of time into the same language, she multiplied her nursing and pumping time by women’s median wage for a total of $11,460.6 The interactive part of the article included a salary slider, so that a woman could redo the math according to her own wages, to find out what feeding her child was worth.
The calculator suggests that my breastfeeding was a lot more valuable when I did it for my second child as chief of staff at a non-profit than when I fed my first baby while working in a campus ministry. The wage-scaled number is helpful as a measure of opportunity cost — what I might be giving up while stepping back from work or shifting to limited hours — but it’s a bad portrait of value. My nursing isn’t more valuable than that of a mom with a minimum wage just because my forgone wages might be higher. (And in practice, I had paid leave for three months, so I lost less than a poorer mom without leave would have risked.)
Translating care into cash helps people avoid talking about un-waged work as worthless, implicitly zeroed out. But when it’s the primary way of translating labor into value, it puts a higher weight on the care richer women offer, and it flattens out the reasons we take on this kind of care work.
The Dignity of Dependence is available at a 40% discount directly from Notre Dame Press with the code 14SUM25 as part of their summer sale.
I strongly recommend Alyssa’s whole piece, of which the wage-tabulation was just a part. But the sense that keeping the meter running while I do “care work” will make it more obviously valuable still doesn’t sit right with me.
I have a visceral recoil at the idea of being paid for my care work. It's demeaning, turning an act of love into an act of commerce. Furthermore, it deepens the roots of individualism and materialism into our culture's value system.
I find it ironic that advocates for care wages are most likely to come from avowed anti-capitalists. It's like, as much as they supposedly hate the system, they can't imagine a way of valuing something that doesn't involve money. Plus, once the logic of capitalism extends beyond its appropriate sphere, it begins to distort whatever it touches.
There are also innumerable problems with trying to calculate the value of care. Are we focusing on the visible, quick return items like chores? Does it matter how well one folds the laundry or how quickly the dishes get washed? Or do we base it on how well loved the recipients of said care are, how much they flourish and grow? And how do care wages work when the carer is injured or depressed, in need of more support but less able to provide their usual level of care?
The way to esteem care is to provide care for the caregivers, and once again, that is best provided from love and not pay. Extended family, neighbors, churches, friends. My children are 11 and under, and I already tell them to stay close to home if possible when they grow up, so I can support them, and they can support each other. When my daughters say they want to be stay at home moms like me, I take it as a compliment.
This is in contrast to the advice I internalized growing up, that if I wanted to make a difference, I needed to be willing to go, that my intelligence would take me far. Partly those messages took root because my family of origin moved so much, and we were so far from extended family all the time. But stories of people who moved to the big city and made a difference or had success were praised and repeated often in school and church. It felt normal for family to be merely nuclear and to move for the career or mission of the main breadwinner.
So it was a revelation after starting a family in Chicago, without a good support network, when we moved closer to my parents and they got involved in our lives, and us in theirs. I was immediately converted to the wisdom of staying close to home.
Anyway, that is how I'm teaching my children to value care. I don't know how to generalize it. But hopefully it resonates with this community.
Families should be builders and transmitters of wealth, not as their highest purpose but as a proximate and practical purpose of living in the world. Teach your children the way you make your living, so at least they know one way to make a living. Homes should be centers of production, not just palace residencies. Piecework, cottage industry, remote work, subsistence farming, multi-family living, mixed-use zoning, taxation in kind rather than in cash, ancestral family land, and of course the commons all make life more human and more sustainable.
I'm not full-on saying there must be a repudiation of the industrial revolution! Medical care relies on much of what came out of that. But we can't have an atomized, lonely society and make sense of happy family life, which both makes life liveable and presents to us very core images of what God (and the INHERITANCE he promises us) is like.
Live on less stuff, and with more people. Is that a moral principle? An eschatological principle? Or just good economic sense?