Do You Work?
The beginning of the new school year brings with it renewed laments — in the news and on social media — about how underpaid and underappreciated teachers are. Included in this group are those who provide care for very young children. They may be referred to as “early childhood educators”, “daycare providers”, or “childcare workers”. By whatever name, it is almost universally agreed that those individuals who care for other people’s children deserve more respect and higher pay than they are currently receiving.
I am not here to argue with that assertion. Certainly, as a society, we should value those who provide care for young children. However, the solutions that are offered to this problem — ranging from universal, government-paid daycare to stricter education and training standards for child care workers — usually overlook a key factor in the way child care providers are regarded. And the people who are most likely to be wringing their hands over the lack of respect for early childhood educators are more part of the problem than they are part of the solution.
This is because the people most concerned with advocating for “child care workers” are often the same people who are most dismissive and disrespectful of those who care for their own children. Although the number of fathers who are taking on the role of the at-home parent is growing, the overwhelming majority of these people are at-home moms.
Ask an at-home mom what her least favorite question is, and she will likely tell you it is: “Do you work?” We are asked this question over and over, even by people who honestly value and respect what we do. It has simply made its way into the general consciousness that being an at-home mom may be a lot of lovely things, but work is certainly not one of them.
In 2019 the stereotypes about at-home moms, which emerged in the 1970’s and 80’s, still persist. Some of the loudest voices in government and the media regard such mothers as “kept women” — dilettantes who spend their time going to pilates classes and having their nails done. Women who do not “contribute to society” the way those do who are employed outside the home. A frequent refrain is, “You’re lucky to have that luxury”. The assumption being that any family that can afford to have a parent at home must be, financially, incredibly well-off.
In fact, a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center found that this bit of counterintuitive thinking (single income families have more money than dual-income families), is completely inaccurate. According to their research:
The median household income for families with two full-time working parents and at least one child under 18 at home is $102,400, compared with $84,000 for households where the father works full time and the mother works part time and $55,000 for households where the father works full time and the mother is not employed.
Amazingly, amidst all the disdain for at-home parents, people wonder why child care workers get so little respect. But you cannot have it both ways. You cannot claim that caring for young children is a noble calling when it is done for pay, but “not work” when it is done by parents. Well, you can, and people certainly do. But the cognitive dissonance required to maintain this position cannot be maintained for long. It is inevitable that, when people hear the message that being home all day with young children is a leisure activity, they will wonder why on earth those who do it as a profession should be paid more than minimum wage. (It brings to mind an episode of The Office, where Dwight Schrute refused to tip a pizza delivery person because, “I don’t pay people to do work I could do myself.”) When at-home moms are routinely dismissed as lazy and unintelligent and unambitious, why would people think that child care workers deserve to be highly valued?
For years the “mommy wars” has been framed as a conflict that places at-home moms on one side, employed moms and daycare providers on the other. But the relationship between child care providers and the parents who employ them is not the symbiotic, Mary Poppins-esque one it is often portrayed as. (For an in-depth discussion of this issue see Caitlin Flanagan’s How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement.) After all — even taking into account the way the government privileges paid child care with tax credits — from an economic perspective, it is necessary that daycare providers earn significantly less than the parents who employ them. However much parents protest that a nanny is “like part of the family,” the reality is that she is an employee. Is there any other industry in which employer-employee relations are assumed to be so mutually beneficial and non confrontational?
If there is a divide to be bridged, it is between those who make a career of caring for children (whether paid or unpaid) and those who do not. At-home moms and childcare workers face the same stereotypes and lack of respect for the work they do. They share the same frustration at those who claim to believe that the care of young children is vitally important, yet treat that work as if it is something no intelligent woman would want to spend her days doing.
Everyone says that child care workers deserve more respect — that we, as a society, need to value the work they do. But we cannot simultaneously revere paid carers and denigrate unpaid carers. We cannot be a society that respects child care providers until we are a society that respects at-home parents.
