The Terrifying Reality of the Mommy Trap

Maternity leave here in the US is limited to the FMLA, three months of unpaid or partially paid leave for any employee with caring responsibilities. Women who give birth are given no quarter in the US: you just have to shoulder your unique biological burden and get back to work asap if you want to keep your job. Usually that involves a mix of family help and daycare. For lower income women, daycare, often a cheaper home daycare, is the default option. 

In this interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Jonathan Cohn, author of the recent article 'The Hell of American Daycare', gives a good rundown of the history of family leave regulation in the US. The upshot of it is that, due to moral squeamishness about endorsing mothers of young children working outside the home, Americans are left to fend for themselves when it comes to childcare. 

As usual, it's the poor who suffer most. If your mother lives nearby and can take care of your baby: great, you can go back to work with peace of mind. If you're rich enough to afford a nanny, as many are where I live, then you can go back to work with peace of mind (kind of...). If you're lower-income and have no family nearby, however, you're on your own.

As Jonathan Cohn describes with heart-rending detail in his story for the New Republic, it's the children who ultimately suffer. And yet, still, women go back to work and put their children at risk in poorly regulated daycare places because they have no choice. In fact, 68% of women with children under 6 years of age are in the US labor force. Why would so many women still choose to work when daycare provision is so bad and so expensive? 

I would guess that, apart from financial necessity, it has something to do with this article in Atlantic magazine 'The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment'. It shows pretty conclusively that if you have been out of work for more than six months, even if you have relevant professional experience, you have almost no chance of being hired. In that context, a short career break to raise your preschool aged children can turn out to be the end of your career. 

It's an understandable prejudice on behalf of employers: why hire someone whose contacts and skills are five years out of date, when there is someone else on your list who is moving from an identical job or has just been 'in-between jobs' for a few months? Taking on a long-term unemployed person is a higher risk option. Taking on someone who has spent five years taking care of their children is slightly less risky as they have a legitimate reason for the break but it's nonetheless a risk. The only way to lessen the risk is to regulate. Somewhere along the line in this unregulated mess, the government is the only one who can step in to create either supply or demand. Either improve the supply of daycare through tax incentives and improved regulation or improve the demand for hiring the long-term unemployed, including parents returning to work, through incentives and specialized back-to-work schemes. That would go a long way to reducing the terrifying reality of the mommy trap.